Meeting of the Parliament 29 May 2018
No. I am sorry.
That is a damning indictment on this centralising Government. This bill has missed opportunities throughout. To some extent, I feel sorry for my colleagues who will have to take the bill through stage 2, because of the number of amendments that will have to be passed in order to make it work. It will certainly give them plenty of entertainment over the next few months.
In the short time remaining, I will give one example of where I consider there to be a power grab and one example of where there is a gaping hole in the bill.
I am a great fan of local development plans. They are, in principle, a good thing. They can be looked at and reviewed every five to 10 years. They can give the local area, the city or the region some understanding of where it is going over that time.
I am pleased that the Government has agreed that we need to engage with communities, although there are still difficulties around defining who the local community is and how the local community is heard. I spent 11 years attending community council meetings in my ward. The community councillors were often very good people who were looking to represent their areas, but I am not sure that they totally represented the whole public view of what was going on in my neighbourhood. We need devices to be open to us that will engage the whole community in an area.
We will have local development plans that will go through vast amounts of drafting by council officers, be debated by the planning committee and be approved by a full council—but then what? The minister will sign them off. Why does a minister need to sign off a local development plan? The key, surely, is in the first word, which is “local”, not “national”. That is not something that the Government should scrutinise or take over, which takes away from the whole concept of local democracy.
The second point that the committee will need to come back to—which I raised with the minister last Thursday in general questions—is with regard to disability housing and housing for people with different disabilities. As far as I can see—I am open to correction—nothing in the bill at this stage gives any assurance that appropriate housing and the right number of houses will be built for people with disabilities. The committee needs to have a think about that at stage 2, as does Parliament at stage 3. The perception is that we simply build housing and fit the disabled stuff in. Too often I hear from disability charities that it costs thousands of pounds to adapt a property that is not set up for wheelchairs, visual impairment or other disabilities.
This stage of the bill has been disappointing so far. Like everyone bar the Lib Dems, Conservative members will support the motion, because we hope that the bill can be changed with amendments at stage 2 and stage 3. There is a long way to go, and the Government must listen to local communities and even to its SNP councillors.