Few have experience of how things work on the ground

3:27pm Tuesday 15th July 2008

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END of term and almost three months when the government can do as it likes and there's no-one in parliament to even ask a question.

But it's not the end of the session. Parliament returns on October 6 for another six or seven action packed weeks! Much of this will be in the Lords where the Counter-Terrorism Bill – the 42 days proposal and much more in its 98 pages – faces some little local difficulties.

Then we have the controversial Planning Bill, another 189 pages of riveting reading which we debate on Second Reading this very evening.

Much of it is to set up another new quango (the nattily named Infrastructure Planning Commission) to make it much easier and quicker to push through planning permission for nuclear power stations, new motorways (even railways) and the like.

There are also changes to the local planning system which dates from the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act passed only four years ago.

This was supposed to bring in the "new streamlined planning system" which as some of us predicted has turned out to be more complicated, more bureaucratic, more centralised and even slower than what it replaced.

I am ever more convinced that one of the problems is that very few civil servants and not many ministers (or indeed MPs and peers) have any real experience or understanding of how things work on the ground.

Tomorrow we finish the Housing and Regeneration Bill which received 32 hours of very thorough "scrubbing down" in committee in the presence of a number of distinguished peers in the housing field, plus my Liberal Democrat colleague Baroness Sally Hamwee and myself with more than a little knowledge and experience of local councils and how they operate.

As one senior peer in another party said to us: "You have the advantage that you understand these things."

Well perhaps we do. We've certainly persuaded the Government to make some changes –- improvements we hope – and we'll see how it pans out in practice.

But we hoped that the last Housing Act would give councils like Pendle and Burnley new powers, for instance to licence and force improvements to poor quality landlord owned houses. Yet four years later they seem to be fairly unusable.