Planning Bill

moved Amendment No. 41: 41: Clause 5, page 3, line 9, at end insert— ““( ) The policy set out in a national policy statement may not— (a) identify any location or site as suitable (or potentially suitable) or unsuitable for a specified description of development; (b) identify any individual statutory undertaker or undertakers as appropriate persons to carry out a specified description of development.”” The noble Lord said: This is so small a group of amendments that it is barely even an hors d’oeuvre for this session of the Committee. However, the two amendments in it raise an important point. They would remove the capacity, spelled out in the Bill, for national policy statements to be site specific. They are probing amendments, because there may be cases where it is appropriate to designate sites—I would be the first to acknowledge that. However, we need to do that with our eyes open. The first and obvious question is how far, if we designate the sites, we are in effect pre-empting the whole planning process. If we are going to need seven nuclear power stations or reactors and we designate seven sites, is that designation not tantamount to granting permission? Perhaps that is what is intended. Of course, if the Minister can tell me that it is intended that 10 sites will be designated so that the commission has a choice, I will accept that the process is open and satisfactory, but there may be other people who would have concerns should that happen. Even worse would be the case where we knew that there was a demand for 10 sites but only seven were designated, which would leave people dissatisfied. That is one aspect of the problem. We need also to be aware that any development of a power station is a long-term matter, not just in the process of development but in relation to the life of the power station. Circumstances may well change. I have tabled another amendment, with which the Minister’s noble friend will probably deal later, addressing heat recovery from power stations, but I will introduce the issue now because it is significant. The electricity generating industry consumes more than 1,100 terawatts of energy to supply customers with somewhat more than 400 terawatts. The figures may have moved up or down since I last looked, but there is no variation in those proportions. Much of that difference is lost in the form of waste heat. We expect society generally to become more energy efficient. We see combined heat and power establishments able to work at an energy efficiency in excess of 80 per cent. If you buy a modern condensing boiler, it, too, will have a thermal efficiency of more than 80 per cent. The fact is that our generating industry is working at somewhere around the 40 per cent mark, if it can get that far. Can we afford to run industry at that level of energy inefficiency? I know that the generators will be shocked when I say that, because the possibilities of using that waste heat have considerable expense attached to them. One obvious way in which to use the heat would be to supply it to communities, but the sort of sites that might be designated for nuclear power stations, in particular, might not be suitable for that because they are all inevitably in rather remote places. Another relevant planning implication is that we may be able to find an industrial use for that heat. However, that has further planning implications outside and outwith the site designation, because it may mean the creation of an industrial estate of some considerable size, given the volumes of energy that we are talking about, in an area where that would not perhaps be judged suitable because of the nature of the countryside and the remoteness of the area. There are wide implications behind this decision on site specificity—if I can get my tongue around that word. We need to go into this with our eyes wide open, so it is worth discussing. I beg to move.