Planning Bill

I believe that E.ON has submitted a planning application for a coal-fired power station, and I suggest that it needs to get on with it. Under the new system, it would be mired in the courts under judicial review into infinity. It will be really helpful if I can get back to what we agree about. We agree that the system needs to be sped up. We agree on the single consent regime. We agree in principle on the national policy statements and on the community infrastructure levy, which we did not reach this afternoon, largely because the changes to the programme motion allowed the Government to ensure that we would not debate it. In Committee, we put forward ideas to make the Bill work better. We wanted to keep the democratic principles. We wanted a vote in Parliament on a national policy statement because that would make it democratically owned. We do not want Ministers to make decisions on the IPC, and we tabled a variety of amendments to determine whether the Government had made any moves towards understanding that the IPC will be totally undemocratic and unaccountable. The IPC will be abolished. We have agreed to take on the review after two years that the Secretary of State offered the hon. Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts). In two years we will be in government, and we will review the IPC out of existence. For the second time today, I put on record the fact that anyone who takes up a contract to be a commissioner will have a very short contract. We want to ensure that applications are kept out of the courts, but this system will drive them into the courts, to judicial review. We want local authorities to have effective powers over the community infrastructure levy. We want them to have effective powers over small planning applications and local housing and planning developments. We do not want regional development agencies to take over those roles. The Bill does not allow for a vote on national policy statements in Parliament. It hands over the power and responsibility of Ministers. The British people understand that Ministers are there to take decisions, not to hand that power to the unelected. Handing over the powers to the IPC is an abrogation of their democratic responsibility. We do not want planning authority to be transferred from regional assemblies, which we hate anyway, to RDAs, which are inappropriate bodies to handle it. We do not want infrastructure money to be taken away from the people in a community who suffer from developments and handed to somewhere totally remote from where they live. It was a scandal that we did not consider the community infrastructure levy on Report. Key points of principle needed to be debated—although, of course, we could not have debated the detail because we still do not know it. I doubt that even the House of Lords will have the detail. It looks as though the community infrastructure levy is unravelling. The Government are setting it up to fail, and they are getting away with it because they are not prepared to repeal the Planning-gain Supplement (Preparations) Act 2007. Until that Act is repealed, it provides a fall-back position for the Government. If the 2007 Act is still on the statute book, no one will accept that the community infrastructure levy can be made to work under the various proposals that might come forward. It is a paving Act, but the mere fact that it is on the statute book indicates that the Government are still prepared to use it. I challenge the Government to repeal the Act. When they do, we might get a workable community infrastructure levy. We have not been able to debate the serious transfer of power to the Welsh Assembly and we have not been able to discuss issues relating to Scotland. The Bill is one of the most undemocratic, unaccountable—