|
> Home
> News cuttings >
Quango
Local Government
Chronicle - 21 January 2008
Roll up, roll up! The great quango bonanza is here again. There are so many quangos that it is difficult to rank them in order of importance but I guess the field is headed by the Health and Safety Executive (motto: find out what they are doing and tell them to stop it), the Learning and Skills Council and the two FSAs- the Financial Services Agency and the Food Standards Agency. But now the Government is once again in labour: three new super-quangos are being delivered- in adjacent committee rooms in the House of Commons as it happens.
The Housing and Regeneration Bill is delivering twins. As part of the Government’s desire to boost the supply of “available and affordable housing” the investment side of the Housing Corporation is being merged with the regeneration function of English Partnerships to create a Homes and Communities Agency. The same bill will create a new regulator for social housing (following the Cave review) christened the Office for Tenants and Social Landlords-Oftenant to its friends. The aim is to begin with housing associations but eventually to extend its remit to local authority housing to bring about a unified regulatory regime for the social housing sector. Midwife for this delivery is the cheerful enough junior housing minister Ian Wright.
Simultaneously, next door, John Healey, local government minister who has a sideline being in charge of floods, is matron to the birth of the grandly titled Infrastructure Planning Commission which will take over responsibility for planning applications for infrastructure projects of national importance like new runways, ports, nuclear power stations, disposal of nuclear waste and the like. The idea is that the Government will publish National Planning Statements on the key sectors which will provide the framework within which the planning applications are judged. The aim is speed up dramatically a planning process which took eight years to approve Terminal Five at Heathrow.
If Ian Wright is facing, for the most part, questions about detail John Healey is having a much tougher job persuading a somewhat perplexed committee to push a bit harder. Where on earth does a planning statement (about a dozen of these Biblical texts are envisaged) end and a planning application begin? If the statement is, in the jargon, “site specific” – in other words if it names sites for nuclear plants or runways or power lines- what is left for the Commission to do? The IPC will have some 35 commissioners chosen for their “expertise” and is expected to handle around 45 cases a year. The Planning Inspectorate will, of course, continue to exist. It handles some 900 enquiries on appeal every year.
John Healey keeps offering epidurals to ease the committee’s labour pains. To charges that the IPC will not be accountable he argues that it will operate within the framework of the national planning statements which will have been subject to heavy scrutiny in and out of Parliament; will be answerable to a select committee; will be embraced by freedom of information legislation, will have to face the Ombudsman and will have to report annually to Parliament.
This bill also introduces the “roof tax” – the levy on development to help fund the infrastructure needs the development generates. Whilst generally welcome (if only because it is not the daft planning gain tax) Healey will need to go into detail on how the tax will be levied, by whom and what it will be used for. At least his last job was in the Treasury so he will be back on more comfortable territory.
The Housing and Communities Agency has been delivered of a chief executive. Sheffield’s Sir Robert Kerslake has been appointed after 10 years as city boss during which time he has served on enough regional boards to build a raft. He is credited with forging good relations with the private sector: given that the Housing Corporation has managed, arguably, the most successful private finance initiative the country has ever seen (£35bn of private sector money levered into social housing without a single default) it is crucial that the market should have confidence in its successor.
The lesson from the committee floor of the House of Commons, though, is simple: quangos rule, OK!
© Local Government Chronicle
|
previous page