Planning Bill

moved Amendment No. 1: 1: Clause 1, page 1, line 5, at end insert ““for the purpose of advising Parliament on applications for orders granting development consent”” The noble Lord said: The Bill creates yet another public body and yet another burden on the poor old taxpayer. This may be a minute matter when considered in the context of the Statement on national finances that we shall discuss at four o’clock, but we are running a record budget deficit and here we have a proposal to increase it. It may be a marginal increase only but it is an increase. I have not been able to extract information on this, so I hope that the noble Baroness will tell us exactly what the costs are and, perhaps even more importantly, what savings might arise if the commission comes into being. She will reply to this group of amendments which go to the heart of the Bill as it establishes the Infrastructure Planning Commission to deal with the heavyweight planning applications that arise from time to time, and are likely to arise with increasing regularity over the coming years as we attempt to restructure our energy industry, improve our major infrastructure across the country and meet our climate change obligations about which we became well informed during the passage of the Climate Change Bill earlier in the Session. These are heavyweight matters. Amendment No. 1 is a probing amendment and seeks to establish a slightly different purpose for the Infrastructure Planning Commission from that in the Bill. It seeks to enable the commission to advise Parliament on applications for orders granting planning permission. The reason for doing this is, in my view, very sound. Planning is not, and never has been, an exact science. I spent some time on a planning committee, which rapidly drove me close to insanity. The fact that I survived and am here to talk about it offers hope for the future, but perhaps that is not the view of those sitting opposite. Development in whatever form is rarely site-specific. Most development can be established on a variety of sites. Up until now that decision has rightly been political. It is a political decision, whether it is taken by local politicians sitting on local planning authorities, or by the Secretary of State on call-in if the application is of sufficient national significance, is of sufficient exception to existing planning policy, or is an appeal. The very fact that the final decision is taken by an elected politician gives strength and integrity to the existing planning process. However, the Bill removes that and in doing so diminishes the strength and integrity of the existing system. It seems to me that, certainly initially, the results of the new system will be far more open to challenge, albeit that the existing system—the Bill seeks to tackle this—permits many challenges before planning permission is granted for controversial applications. We need to explore exactly why the Government are departing from this sound principle. We regard that departure as a disadvantage. There are many ways to approach the difficulty and this is not the only one. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, proposes a different approach in a later amendment in the group. I will leave her to speak to that and another amendment in the group in her name. We do not think that the Government have really thought this through. If we were to finish up with the proposed system, the way in which decisions are finally taken would need to be changed. At the moment, we are exploring the possibilities. The amendment suggests that the commission should become an advisory body, doing all the hard work that has to be done—by golly, there will be hard work to be done—and then making a recommendation to Parliament, which is my personal preference. That is a subject for debate at this stage, because these matters need greater clarification. We are attempting to tease out the Government’s motives and the justification for their proposals. Amendment No. 2 is in the same group. It removes the possibility of future changes to the planning commission. We should not contemplate with any form of comfort the chance of what I would call ““mission creep””. The body of people who will be required to do the work under the commission established by the Government will perforce need to become very specialist. In effect, it is a specialist branch of the inspectorate. I pay tribute to the planning inspectorate; I have known members of that body over the years and they are remarkable people. In some circumstances, they have had to do remarkable jobs. One thinks of the two obvious applications; Sizewell B and terminal 5. They were deeply intense matters that called for detailed knowledge and critical judgment. I know that the Government’s ambition in the Bill is to diminish such types of inquiry. They cannot do that without the creation of a great deal of certainty, and that must be done by politicians; no one else can do it. Amendment No. 2 is designed to make that specialist body exactly what it is and to keep it that way. Amendment No. 4 is another probing amendment, which requires commission appointments to be made by a similar means to that used to appoint members of the planning inspectorate. Those people, whoever they may be and whatever their background—I suspect some of them will come from the inspectorate; maybe the noble Baroness will tell us that they all will—must be very intensively trained. This is not going to be the same sort of job that is presently done by a planning inspector. They are going to have to go through all the detail. Preliminary procedures are laid out about consultation and so on. The whole application process is different and the applicants will face a different working environment. Their applications will have to be perfect from the day that the commission receives them because the process that is laid down will not permit the type of negotiation that has often occurred during inquiries. Indeed, it was not at all unusual for an application to be amended in the course of its development. The application will have to be word-perfect when it is sent to the commission, because otherwise it will have the absolute right to throw it out. The amendment is therefore tabled to find out exactly how the commission’s members will be appointed and to give me an opportunity to mention the very intensive training which will undoubtedly be required before the commission can start to function effectively. Amendment No. 5 offers a different approach to this dilemma, which I introduced when I spoke to the first amendment. If we delete subsection (3), we effectively delete Schedule 1. If we do that, we do not have a commission to worry about. That is taking the ground from under the feet of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, for which I apologise. Her opposition to the Question that Clause 1 stand part of the Bill is included in this group of amendments. I beg to move.