Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

These three amendments relate to the power of the Secretary of State to give Natural England guidance. The Secretary of State needs this power to help to ensure that Natural England continues to focus on achieving government outcomes over time and to allow her to give guidance on how its purposes are to be achieved. This is a necessary provision for a body which will deliver such a large amount of the Government’s policies and which will be the source of the Government’s expertise in key areas. At the risk of repeating myself, I can say that the power to give guidance is a standard provision for most large non-departmental public bodies—for example, the Environment Agency. As the noble Viscount has just reminded us, guidance from the Secretary of State will be published, which means that the process will be open and transparent. Guidance will be on topics such as Natural England’s role in relation to regional planning and associated matters, as referred to specifically in the Bill at Clause 15(1). I shall have a little more to say about regional planning in a moment. The guidance will be discursive, by which I mean that it will resemble an essay rather than a statutory instrument. Although Natural England must have regard to the guidance, it will not be bound by it. Following pre-legislative scrutiny by, and at the suggestion of, the EFRA Committee, subsections (3) and (6) were inserted to make Clause 15 clearer. Subsection (5) was added on Report in another place to add extra certainty about how such guidance can be varied or revoked. Amendments Nos. 206 and 215 would effectively make this guidance the subject of an order before Parliament. As I indicated earlier, the guidance will include topics such as Natural England’s role in regional planning. We do not think it appropriate to make such guidance subject to parliamentary procedure. The priority has to be that a wide range of stakeholders understand English Nature’s role in such matters. That is why we emphasise publication and think that that is the right approach. I turn to the issue of why regional planning processes are not specifically referred to in the Bill—for example, regional spatial strategies. A list of regional planning processes within subsection (1) would be relatively inflexible and could become out of date quickly. That addresses the concerns of the EFRA Committee, and clarifies the importance that we place on Natural England’s engagement at regional level. Will the regional planning board bodies have to listen to Natural England? The clause cannot be used to place a duty on other public bodies to listen to Natural England. The Select Committee report made it clear that it did not think that any person had a right to be heard at a public examination. Clause 4 gives Natural England very robust powers to ask other public bodies for an explanation if it believes that its advice has not been acted on. Any public body is at risk of judicial review through the courts if a party feels that Natural England is acting unlawfully. On Amendment No. 216, to which the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, spoke, I am advised that a strict requirement of ““contemporaneously”” could provide practical difficulties. As a matter of protocol we expect Natural England to have a copy of the final guidance as issued by the Secretary of State a short time before it is published to the world at large, so that Natural England has the opportunity to respond to press inquiries. If the guidance is published on the web, it would need to be uploaded on to a server. If the guidance is published in paper form, someone has to produce the paper copies and make them available. Even if these arrangements could be put into effect very speedily, it is unlikely that publication could be genuinely contemporaneous. I hope that the noble Duke does not think that I am making a petty point; it is ““contemporaneously”” that is the problem. It is our intention that the guidance will be circulated to interested parties and published on the website as soon as practicably possible. It is already implicit in Clause 15 that by publishing guidance we want to be open and transparent. Because of the concern expressed by the noble Duke, we shall consider his amendment to see whether we can assert a phrase that indicates dispatch in publishing the guidance without creating the practical difficulties that I have tried to describe.