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Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [Lords]

I hate to tell the hon. Gentleman about his own constituency, but his constituents—his councillors—first identified sites in various parts of Luton and neighbouring areas that were sufficient for housing targets. In my view those areas are quite sensible places to build, but it is up to those councillors. It was only when there was a degree of opposition from some locals in those areas that the councillors thought, "Let's put the houses in someone else's area where it doesn't matter if there's opposition, because they can't vote against us as they're not in our constituency." There are plenty of areas in the Milton Keynes-to-Luton region, which is what the target covers, where building could be undertaken, without going into another county. There has recently been a welcome High Court decision that, at first sight, has a bearing on the issue. Hertfordshire county council and St. Albans district council took the eastern area regional plan to the High Court and won, which is the first time that a regional housing plan has, to a degree, been overturned by the High Court. The decision affected both the proposal for Dacorum to spread beyond its boundaries into land owned by St. Albans—the land is the other side of the motorway, so most people do not realise that it is owned by St. Albans—and building work in Welwyn and Hatfield. Knowing that I was going to raise the issue today, my local newspaper, the Herts Advertiser, made the helpful suggestion that we could rely on the court case to achieve what I want to achieve through parliamentary measures. Unfortunately, my understanding is that we cannot do so, although I look forward to a response from the Minister if I am wrong and if the case has indeed solved the problem. My understanding is that the court said that the east of England plan was wrong because of a failure to carry out a proper strategic environmental assessment of urbanising the belt between Dacorum, St. Albans and Welwyn and Hatfield and the fact that they would begin to merge into each other if building took place. The decision was not based on a rejection of the right of one council to build outside its own area. I therefore hope that, in summing up, the Minister will correct me if I am wrong. Indeed, I would be delighted if I were wrong and if the case means that the threat from Luton and South Bedfordshire in North Hertfordshire has disappeared. I hope that the Bill will be amended to close that loophole; otherwise, the Bill's very objectives will be threatened. I am concerned that it has emerged that the Committee stage of the Bill will be so brief as to inhibit the time to amend it appropriately and close that loophole. I know that the Minister cannot give me a commitment to table specific amendments today, but I would ask him to give a commitment in summing up at least to give serious consideration to introducing an appropriate amendment in Committee. Unless he does so speedily, the opportunity for the House to do its job and amend the Bill to improve it will be lost. I hope very much to hear from the Minister at the end of this debate that he will do that. I shall briefly make some broader points. The Bill purports to promote local democracy. How does it do that? It does so by telling local authorities what they must do and how they must do it, and then monitoring them and sanctioning them if they do not do it. What is the cost? What are the resources? What is the time frame? How many extra officials will need to be employed to ensure that authorities are meeting the 3,000 words of obligations imposed on them? What resources will be made available from central Government to enable those officials to do those things? If they are already doing them, no extra resources will be required, but then no extra legislation will be needed. The presumption must be that many officials are not doing those things and that extra resources will therefore be required. At a time of economic crisis, the one thing we ought not to be doing is adding to the enormous deficit that this country faces, which exceeds the entire budget of the Department, as well as the budgets of the defence system and the education system. I cannot believe that we are going to add to it, albeit in small ways, by imposing extra obligations, which will require extra resources, on local authorities. This is a sign that the Government have no idea of the scale of the crisis that we face, not just this year but for years to come. If we are to bring total public expenditure back into line with the taxable resources of this country, why are they seeking to place on local government additional costly obligations that no one in the Chamber has so far suggested are necessary? Nor have I heard any call from outside the Chamber for these duties to promote this, that and the other. The second thing that the Bill does is to promote local government by transferring power away from elected and partly elected bodies. It moves power from regional bodies—which are pretty bad, but at least they contain some indirectly elected members—to leaders' boards. We are not told what the composition of the leaders' boards will be. The presumption is that they will consist of the leaders of the local authorities, although that is not spelled out in the Bill. They could consist of the chief executives of the local authorities—or their wives and girlfriends, or husbands and boyfriends. The composition is not spelled out; we are simply told that a board will be established and that it will be called a leaders' board. One thing that we know is that people will not be directly elected to the leaders' boards. The boards will have a constitution and duties imposed on them by the Government. In practice, they will be supervised and monitored by the Government, and they will be dissolved if the Government do not like them. This seems to be going in exactly the wrong direction. I would like a Bill that genuinely lived up to its title, and that promoted local democracy, economic development and the construction of houses in the right places, but I fear this Bill will not do that. Unless it is modified, it will be undermined by the growing exploitation of a loophole that threatens all its key objectives. It promotes additional burdens on local authorities—and, ultimately, on the local taxpayer—for which there is no demand and no need, and it removes power from the people to central Government and to unelected bodies in a wholly undesirable way, for which the House has so far shown no support.