Planning Bill

I too support the amendments and, in so doing, apologise to Members of the Committee for not having been able to be present at Second Reading. I shall make two brief points but, before doing so, I pay tribute to the absolute tour de force from my noble friend Lord Howarth. This has been an absolutely superb short debate today and I will be very brief, but I wanted to pick up on a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Best, which has prompted me to rise, although the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, has now stolen my thunder. I wanted to say that as a client for the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, a PFI-commissioned hospital and medical school, it is not the PFI process that causes us to have poor or good design, it is the behaviour, aspirations and ambition of the client. One reason why I support the amendments—apart from all the other reasons that have been put forward today—is that, if the Homes and Communities Agency now has a specific statutory duty to attend to and promote good design, as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said, it is absolutely consistent that the National Planning Commission has exactly the same duties and responsibilities. More importantly, if the commission has this responsibility, it sends an incredibly powerful message to clients who will come forward with major infrastructure projects that will be so visually dominant across the country, as a number of noble Lords have said, to stiffen their resolve when commissioning the kind of designs that will have to be paid for in the main by private finance. Naturally, I want to complete the circle and make the point that, if we want PFI-sponsored projects that are strongly designed, we should use every encouragement possible in the Bill to send the strong message that the commission, when considering these things, will take the greatest possible account of that.