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Planning-gain Supplement (Preparations) Bill

The hon. Lady may have misheard me, but I said that most people disliked development. I declare an interest, in that I write on these subjects for Planning and Estates Gazette and that has been my profession since I was 22, so I have a long history of trying to understand planning and development issues. My experience is that the vast majority of people are suspicious—the French word is ““méfiant””—of development proposals. That is generally true and in such circumstances one needs to make them feel that a development is proposed not just for the aggrandisement of the local council or the advantage of the developer, but that local people will gain something from it. That means some local injection of money, rather than the funds being spread about. That is especially true in Scotland—as the hon. Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) pointed out—which has a sad history of a centralising tendency. There is not quite the willingness to allow local authorities to make some of the decisions that one would hope that they might. We should wait to find out the facts before the provisions of the Bill take effect. The House is being asked to sign a blank cheque and the effect will be worse in Scotland. The Government are suggesting to the people of Scotland, and to the people of England and Wales, a process that is utterly alien to parliamentary democracy. The Government are asking for the right to spend people’s money on something that they will not delineate, at a cost that they will not quantify and subject to a tax that they will not specify. The proposal will produce a sum that the Government will not name, that will be divided on a basis of which they are not certain and that will be spent in a way that they will not restrict. That is what the Government are asking people to vote for. That is an intolerable proposal. The only thing that is certain in the Bill is the bill for the preparation for something that may never happen. That makes this a very peculiar Bill. It is a mark of the seriousness of the state of governance of this country that we have got this far and most of the press have not noticed that peculiarity. If we are not careful, we will go on having such Bills, because they are very convenient for the Government. They do not have to tell anybody in Scotland anything about the issue. We have not been told how much will be raised in Scotland or how it will be divided. Nor have we been told whether the Treasury will get its hands on it. That is the most important thing for the discussion between the Treasury and the Scottish Executive. There is, of course, a significant financial subsidy for Scotland that comes from the rest of the British taxpayers. Does the Treasury have it in mind that, if the Scottish Executive get this money, it might revisit the Barnett formula? Might it have a look and see whether it could ante off this money? If I were a Scottish Member of Parliament, I would want to know that. I have to tell Scottish Members of Parliament that the daily conversation on the lips of my constituents is about whether it is reasonable for them to ante up the money in circumstances in which they have no control over its spending. I would not be at all surprised if there were a little gleam in the Treasury’s mind that perhaps this is one of the ways in which it can right that wrong. If so, the Treasury should come clean. We want to know about it. But, then, it has not come clean on anything else. I am going to vote for the new clause if it is pressed to a Division, as I hope it will be, not just because I am a believer in devolution and I support the idea that Scotland should know where it is, but because I think that, if we allow this matter to get away from us on this occasion, we will also allow a whole lot in the Bill in general to get away from us. We are allowing the Government to come to the House with a Bill that contains nothing. It is as empty as the ten-minute Bill that I moved earlier. Aficionados will know that when one moves a ten-minute Bill, it has only a title and a long title. Between the First and the Second Readings, one puts in the bit about which one has spoken. The amazing thing about the Government is that their Bill has only a title and, in effect, a long title, and they have not bothered to put the bit in between.