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Planning-gain Supplement (Preparations) Bill

I am pleased that the Financial Secretary to the Treasury has just come back to the Chamber, because I was about to say that Ministers in this Government fall into one of two tendencies: the hysterical tendency or the rational tendency. He is one of the few who fall into the latter category. He could almost sell me a used car; I say almost for reasons that I shall explain. I felt a slight sense of surrealism while I listened to the speeches. The Government gave us what my grandmother would have called ““A lick and a promise,”” the lick being the Bill, and the promise being what might eventually follow it. My hon. Friends the Members for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman), and for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois), who are on the Opposition Front Bench, gave us a promise without the lick. The Liberal Democrats gave us an effusion of licking and promises, including proposals for a tariff-based system, reform of capital gains tax, changes in VAT and a serious exploration of the land value tax. Despite my teasing of the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable), there are substantial reasons for such an exploration, and what he proposes has been tried in the United States. However, the purpose of such a scheme would be to push people into development. In a sense, it would solve one of the other problems that Barker identified, which is people’s reluctance to bring land forward for development. However, if one considers the rate of house price increases since Barker published her report, one wonders to what extent her remedies are relevant, and to what extent they would equalise the rhythm of price rises in Britain and the continent—and that, after all, was why the report was commissioned. I cannot help but think that the Committee stage will have a surreal feeling to it. I cannot for the life of me think what we will discover in Committee that we have not discovered on Second Reading. I see from the motion on the Order Paper that, characteristically for the Government, the Committee is due to sit for only a brief moment, but I suspect that even that is over-generous, in light of what we are likely to discover, especially when I hear from the Minister that he is already exploring the IT to make the system work. I am a member of the Select Committee on Public Accounts, and therefore live on a diet of failed IT systems, and I hope that the Minister will not choose the consultants who gave us the Rural Payments Agency, or some of the other consultants used in the past, to set up the system. I cannot help but feel—I have a political twinge—that ultimately the project might not happen at all, and that things may turn out to be even more surreal than we thought.