Planning Bill

If the hon. Gentleman had borne with me for a moment, he would have heard me make observations about points of detail. I was expressing a general view in principle, which is what we should do in debates on Second Reading, about the merit of the infrastructure planning commission and about how it was not, in effect, the unrepresentative quango that it has been represented as. I have no problem with the main architecture of the proposals; I do, however, have a number of concerns about specific procedural issues and about some of the framing of the legislation. My first concern is about how consultation will be handled and about the way in which the public will be able to have their say, particularly on the development of national policy statements that will have a local or regional impact—the very point that the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) raised. Unless we are careful, the framework could mean that national policy decisions are taken without the people who are likely to be affected by the implementation of the proposals at a local level having a full opportunity to understand and feed into the debate on national planning policy. I would like more reassurance that we have understood the importance of enabling people to feed in at the local level at that early stage. Secondly, I am a bit concerned about the decision-making procedures set out in the Bill. Clause 94 rightly insists that the panel ““must have regard”” to any relevant national policy statement, but it does not require the panel to consider other relevant planning policy statements. That seems a curious and unsatisfactory omission, which I hope will be rectified. The omission is even more surprising when one sees how dangerously open-ended the phrasing is in clause 94(2)(c), which requires the panel to consider"““any other matters which the Panel or Council thinks are…important and relevant””." I can see all sorts of trouble inherent in that. It would be an obvious ploy for an aggrieved party who had not secured the outcome that they wanted from the panel's consideration to seek judicial review on the grounds that it did not have regard to matters that it felt to be ““important and relevant””. That is a rather worrying provision, so I hope that my right hon. and hon. Friends will consider it further. The second main innovation in the Bill is the introduction of a community infrastructure levy. I congratulate my right hon. and hon. Friends on abandoning the previous proposal, for a planning gain supplement, and instead opting for the tariff-based approach that appears to lie behind the community infrastructure levy. I say ““appears””, because the Bill seems to be ambiguous, but in principle I welcome the move. Although the thinking behind a planning gain supplement was sound—it sought to ensure that a proportion of the gain derived from development should be captured to fund necessary infrastructure and social provision, and to mitigate adverse impacts—the mechanism chosen was suspect from the start. There is no need to go over the ground again. Those of us who opposed PGS from the outset spelt out the risks and the disadvantages on numerous occasions, and I am grateful to my right hon. and hon. Friends for listening and responding. Whereas PGS was widely criticised by those with detailed experience of the development process, whether developers or those dealing with development applications, the tariff approach commands much wider support. It is much more likely to give developers certainty on the scale of the contribution that they may have to make, and it retains the direct connection between the locality in which the development is taking place and the contribution. Provided that the level of the levy is set sensibly, the tariff approach should not inhibit development on more marginal sites, while also ensuring a much wider level of contribution than has been secured to date under the section 106 procedures, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham rightly pointed out.