Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Greaves and Lord Howarth of Newport

Monday 31st October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I congratulate the Labour Party on writing such a brilliant amendment. The interesting thing about transitional arrangements is that when the Bill came to your Lordships’ House, they were not being talked about at all. The view was that in six months it could all be sorted out. The more it has been discussed in this House and with Ministers, the more it has become clear to everyone, including those of us who raised it tentatively at first, that it is an extremely important issue. Getting it right is crucial to the transition from the present system to the new system. The good news is that I believe that the Government, particularly the planning Ministers, now understand that. The bad news is that they have not yet produced a clear plan for that transition and how it will work. I believe that it is being thought about seriously across government.

Whether or not it should be in the NPPF is an interesting question. Originally, we were told that it did not need to be in the Bill because it could be in the policy framework. The more some of us think about it, the more complex it is and the policy framework may not be the best place for it—certainly not for most of it. It is so complex and requires so much detailed and substantive guidance to planning authorities on how to cope with the transition that it probably will need separate guidance. I do not think that this would in any way undermine the Government’s wish to bring the total of planning policy guidance down to around 50 pages, although I think that it will be a bit more than that when it comes out. The point is that, by its very nature, guidance on the transitional process will be temporary; it will come and then it will go. That is another reason why perhaps it should not be in the NPPF but should be separate guidance to local planning authorities in some detail as to how to cope.

Going back to another anecdote, I am reminded of the following phrase, which I learnt from Professor Danny Dorling:

“Anecdote is the singular of data”.

In this case I think it genuinely is.

I am about to read from a Pendle Council press release, not for special pleading but because I believe it is typical of the position that very many local planning authorities are in at the moment. I received the press release on Tuesday, headed “Six week consultation on Pendle’s most important planning document”. It says:

“It’s the final chance for Pendle residents to comment on a document that will influence how Pendle changes in the years to come. A six-week consultation starts on Friday 28th October on the Core Strategy”.

Then it explains what is in the document and what its purpose is. It continues:

“Between now and Monday 12th December you can view a draft version of the Core Strategy”,

at various council outlets and libraries throughout Pendle or, alternatively, on the website. It goes on to say:

“During the six-week consultation, planning officers will be attending a series of drop-in sessions in different parts of Pendle”.

That is what that glossy leaflet was all about. I think there are 10 or 12 of those taking place. It is a big consultation operation and exercise. It then says:

“A display will also be available to view at Nelson's Number One Market Street”—

which is the council’s call-in centre—

“for the full six weeks”.

The councillor who looks after planning issues in Pendle says:

“‘The Core Strategy will set out the overall approach for planning and development in Pendle for the next 15 years, so it's essential that residents make their views known before it's finalised … This is your final chance to help shape the future of Pendle’”.

Then I thought: this is all going ahead. The council quite rightly, I think, decided to continue going ahead with the production of its local plan as quickly as possible despite the presence of the Localism Bill casting a shadow over all these operations. This is really localising and turning into an anecdote some of the broad questions that the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, asked. Will Pendle Council and lots of other councils around the country have to start again when this Bill comes into effect? To what extent will they have to go back and revisit their evidence base for their local plan? To what extent will they have to go back to the core strategy—which is 200 to 250 pages thick, I would guess—and rewrite it? To what extent will the whole process now be put back by six or 12 months? Will this quite intensive consultation process all have to be done again at this time next year perhaps? Those are the kinds of practical questions that councils all over the country are facing. They need very clear guidance on the transitional period from the Government as quickly as possible.

I think that this is my last speech on this Bill. There may be sighs of relief around the House. I have already thanked the Minister, her colleagues and the civil servants on the Bill team for their great kindness and for the assistance that I and my colleagues have had. I also want to thank people around the House. I thank the noble Lords, Lord McKenzie and Lord Beecham, on the Labour Front Bench for their very sensible and constructive approach to the Bill. I may be doing severe damage to their career prospects within the Labour Party by saying that, but I think it needs to be said. We have worked with them and discussed things with them. We have not always agreed, but the amount of co-operation that there has been around the House on the Bill has been to the advantage of the House and to the advantage of the Government in that when the Bill leaves very shortly now, it will be a very much better Bill than when it came.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, it is a great strength of the Government’s policy that it commits us to plan-led and sustainable development. It follows from that that it would be extremely unfortunate if there were to be possibly a long interval—a black hole—in which possibly half of planning authorities, maybe even all, did not have a valid plan. During that period there would be real danger of abuse and bad, inappropriate development gaining permission, and perhaps even being built, which would contradict the Government’s proper objectives. Unless the Minister is able this evening to give clear-cut reassurance that there will be firm and legally binding transitional arrangements, I fear there could be consequences that the Government do not want. I also fear that there will be needless public anxiety—or, possibly, even justified public anxiety—and it would be sensible and helpful if the Minister could finally allay our anxieties on this point.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Greaves and Lord Howarth of Newport

Wednesday 8th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

I am talking about the supplementary vote and trying to point out why that is a bad system. However, in any long ballot paper with lots of candidates, people near the top of the ballot paper always do better than people near the bottom. That happens with multiseat elections under the first-past-the-post system, for example. If noble Lords have ideas on how to counter that issue—there are several ideas around—perhaps they can put them forward, but that is not what we are talking about today.

In the 2010 Watford mayoral election—which was won by a Liberal Democrat, so I am not making a party-political point about rejected votes, which might have been against the Liberal Democrat candidate—the number of eliminated ballot papers was 12,202. Of those, the number of valid ballot papers was only 5,381, which is less than half.

The most ludicrous example of all comes from the most recent mayoral election in Torbay in 2005—I do not think that there has been another election since—where the 14 candidates, which I agree is an extreme example, included a Conservative, a Liberal Democrat, a Labour candidate and 11 independents. The Conservative was elected on the second count after the first preferences were added to those few second preferences that transferred to the top two candidates, with a grand total of 28.9 per cent of the vote. Surely that is not a particularly efficient electoral system. The 9,094 first-preference votes for the top two candidates—who were Conservative and Liberal Democrat—accounted for 37.6 per cent of the vote. The other candidates got 15,076 first-preference votes, which is 62.4 per cent of the vote, but only 3,199 of those 15,000-odd votes—that is, 21 per cent—could be transferred. Almost half—49 per cent—of all second preferences votes did not count because they were not transferred, although they accounted for nearly 79 per cent of second preferences. I am not complaining about the fact that the Conservative was elected—the Conservative might have been elected under AV—but what a hopeless voting system to end up with a result like that.

The supplementary vote results in people being cheated out of their second preferences. SV is an inefficient and unnecessary system that was invented for party-political reasons by the Labour Party, which imposed it on the mayoral elections. The supplementary vote is a very bad system that should be rejected.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

In Amendment 25, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, has offered a lifeboat to the coalition, just as my noble friend Lord Rooker did the other day, when—slightly to their surprise—the coalition Government found themselves in another lifeboat. For two reasons, they might do well to take a ride in it.

First, the alternative vote system proposed in the Bill plainly will not work. It would be very foolish for the Government to plough ahead with the proposal because the inadequacies of the system will be exposed in the process of the campaign. There may not have been a seminar on that in the Cabinet room, but there will be a national seminar. If the system is as fallacious as I believe it to be, those weaknesses will ineluctably be exposed and the campaign for the alternative vote will disintegrate and become a fiasco. That might be a matter for some quiet satisfaction to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, but it should be a matter of some anxiety to the noble Lord, Lord McNally, and indeed to all of us. Whatever our views on the rights and wrongs of holding a referendum, getting rid of first past the post and having AV instead, none of us wants to see this process reduced to complete impracticality and ridicule, which is what I fear will happen.

Noble Lords would do well to heed the arguments of, and to use the opportunity put forward by, my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has sought to persuade the House that the supplementary vote is a bad system. In those very interesting exchanges, my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours seemed to have the better of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, in the argument. The supplementary vote system has been road-tested in this country through the practicalities of election campaigns. I am not aware of any significant public dissatisfaction of the practical operation of the supplementary vote system. In Amendments 22 and 25, my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours has offered a lifeboat to the Government; they would be very wise to accept the opportunity that he has presented to them.