Planning Bill

The noble Lord is anxious for me to respond, but he does not give me much time to get to the point. We reached the 50 megawatt limit because it was set in the Electricity Act 1989. It was originally intended to allow local generating stations, typically with a single gas turbine, to be consented below central government level while ensuring that nationally significant power was dealt with centrally. Although the advent of renewable energy technologies means that there is now a wider spread of generating station size, we think that the limit still provides a useful distinction. In wind farm terms, 50 megawatts is about 20 onshore turbines, which is enough to have a significant effect on the wider landscape. The noble Lord should consider how many renewable energy projects built in the past 15 years would have been large enough to qualify for decision-making by the Infrastructure Planning Commission under the Bill. My understanding is that only 6 per cent of the 1,999 megawatts of constructed renewable generating capacity in England and Wales would have been consented via the IPC had it been in existence. Obviously, whether we have the balance right is a matter for debate, but I suggest that those statistics show that only the top end of capacity in relation to onshore wind farms would be caught by the provisions in the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, raised the interesting question of combined heat and power. I assure him that any generating station meeting the thresholds in the Bill will be considered by the IPC, including those that use combined heat and power. Although this is a new area for me, I have observed at Question Time that we are regularly treated, particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Ezra, to the potential of combined heat and power. We have taken steps to encourage the use of combined heat and power, including supporting measures to encourage the development of schemes and increased awareness of the opportunities for combined heat and power. However, in relation to generating stations, it is not always practical to fit this technology, as the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, pointed out. That is why in our guidance to developers we want them to maximise the use of combined heat and power, but we do not think that it would be right to require it. In his last question, the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, bowled the googly of hazardous waste, particularly in relation to nuclear waste. He kindly invited me to write to him. I accept that kind offer. For the sake of the Committee, perhaps I should read the extract that the noble Lord mentioned. It says: "““Hazardous waste can arise from a wide range of materials, from chemical residues from industrial processes to everyday items such as televisions and car batteries””." It does not include radioactive waste. Because hazardous waste has the potential to cause greater harm to the environment and to human health than other types of waste, its management is understandably subject to strict controls, which apply to any projects approved by the IPC. As noble Lords will know, four months ago we published the Managing Radioactive Waste Safely White Paper, which set out our framework for implementing the geological disposal of higher-activity radioactive waste. We have not yet taken a final decision, but the Government believe that the implementation of geological waste disposal would benefit from the Planning Bill reforms, which could assist the delivery of agreements with local communities. If the Government decided that that was the right approach and that it would be sensible to embrace radioactive waste within the work of the IPC, we would bring forward a statutory instrument to include it under Clause 14(3), the use of which we will debate shortly. The instrument would be subject to the affirmative resolution procedure. I reassure the noble Lord that no decision has been taken, but that is what was meant when he received the note about the potential use of the Bill.