Planning Bill

I apologise to the noble Baroness, but my advice was that the Law Society suggested the amendment. Anyway, it is neither here nor there. I am grateful to the noble Baroness and quite happy if she had responsibility for it. It does not make any difference because I am happy to have my name added to it. The amendment is designed to clarify, as the noble Baroness said, whether additional minor development works might require development consent and the process by which that would be dealt with. Amendment No. 157, which we also have in this group, deals with the question of changing the fuel source for a generating station. As drafted, the clause deals with only one type of fuel conversion. One can conceive of other types of fuel conversion perhaps happening. I can easily conceive of a coal station converting to gas, particularly if carbon sequestration were found to be uneconomic and not to work. You would then immediately halve the emissions for the same amount of power generated. Doing that on an existing site with connections to the grid and everything else might make extremely good sense in those circumstances. We thought that the Bill was too narrowly drafted and the definition ought to include a change of fuel used without referring to one particular type of fuel or another, which subsection (2) does at the moment. I hope that the Government will agree that that is a more sensible way of approaching the issue. Amendment No. 159 goes back to what a nationally significant infrastructure project is. If work relates to a minor national infrastructure project which is none the less important and must still be done, how does one deal with the consent for that? It does not appear to be clear in the Bill how these matters will be treated. If one has a major national power station and some enhancement suddenly becomes either desirable or necessary, and that has to go through the local planning system, there might be some interesting consequences as a result of the time spent getting such matters dealt with. We must think about that. I admit that I find it odd that Amendment No. 395 was added to this group but, since it has been, we may as well get it out of the way. The measuring and marking out of land is an offence under the Bill if it is done without consent. We thought that we ought to find out precisely why that is so. The measuring and marking out of land does not do a great deal of damage to land. I entirely agree that it ought only to be done with consent; that would be normal politeness and everything else. However, I should think that every Member of the Committee has had the awkward but not at all unusual experience of notifications of things that have completely gone astray. The perpetrator of this disaster, from the point of view of the recipient, usually has no knowledge that that is the situation. We must think about that. Somebody may well give somebody notice in writing that he intends, because of the terms of his consent, to go on to and start marking it out on a particular date. That notice may well not arrive at the other end, such is the reliability of the modern postal service. Of course there are other means of communication—telephones, e-mail and all the rest—but the accepted method of communication for this sort of thing is a written notice. Sadly, they do not always arrive. We ought to have a little discussion of that topic. It would be an offence in that instance, but once through inadvertence not of one’s own creation.