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Planning Bill

My Lords, my last moral tale was negative in intent, but my present one is positive. Forty-seven years ago, I had to open an office for a small American firm. Our scale was such that we were not going to go out and acquire a building or even design one. I went down to the Design Council and identified the only spread-eagled coat stand that it recommended to the nation. I then found where I could buy one and purchased it. I also bought two chairs by Edward Barnsley. Thirteen years later, I led the management buyout from the American who had founded the firm, and I had five years in which to transform it from being a firm controlled by a single person into a firm that was owned by 50 people. I am delighted to say that more than a quarter of a century later, that firm is the largest of its kind in the world in private hands. I do not want to make too much of this, but it seems to me that the way we began is the way that we have gone on and have therefore been able to flourish. Finally, although Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson’s great Texan colleague, said that the three wisest words in the English language were, ““Wait a minute””—and they apply to the amendment—I think that close behind them comes a sentence that I learned at the Harvard Business School, to the effect that if you do not know where you are trying to get to, any road will get you there.