Planning Bill

I was perhaps unwise to embark on this, and I shall say no more about it. The noble Lord has clearly given much thought to the matter. However, to my mind it would be bizarre if the national park were not consulted. I shall deal briefly with the six amendments in my name in this group. Four of them concern the problems that confront disabled people when dealing with the planning system. Amendment No. 183 suggests that the register of applications should be available, "““in formats accessible to disabled people””." Clearly, this applies particularly to the visually handicapped, and seems to me a sensible thing to do. There should already be an obligation to do this under the Disability Discrimination Act, but I am advised that a large number of authorities and others do not do it. As regards Amendment No. 186, it seems to me obvious that applicants should consult organisations which represent handicapped people. That ought to be in the Bill. Amendment No. 197, to which the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, referred, also concerns disability, and seeks to double the period for response to an application. Documents that are produced in a format which disabled people and blind people can use often arrive days or even weeks after the original consultation. Are the 28 days to apply to those documents? The Government would be wise to consider a longer period here. The amendment suggests 56 days. Amendment No. 201 suggests that, as well as advertising in the press, the statement should be advertised in a talking newspaper in the area, if one is available. This seems to me an obvious point. The other two amendments on disability in my name in this group, Amendments Nos. 193A and 225A, raise a very different point, but one which has given rise to a good deal of concern. The purpose of these amendments is to delete certain subsections in Clauses 43 and 55 respectively to limit the span of consultation to what is reasonable and achievable. These clauses concern people who have an interest in land or who the applicant thinks may have a compensation claim under Section 10 of the Compulsory Purchase Act 1965 or Section 1 of the Land Compensation Act 1973. Both Section 1 and Section 10 claims are in principle capable of being made whether or not any land or interest is being compulsorily acquired from the claimant, and so both sections give rise to compensation claims potentially being made in respect of land which is not on the site of the proposed development but could well be affected by it. A Section 10 claim is a claim for injurious affection for property depreciation exceeding £50 caused by the construction, as opposed to the use, of the relevant infrastructure. A Section 1 claim is a claim caused by the use of the relevant infrastructure. The problem is the near impossibility of identifying with certainty all the land interests in respect of which relevant claims could or might be made. For linear infrastructure, for example a pipeline or overhead electricity line, a judgment would have to be made as to how far away a property would have to be before it could be safely excluded from the notification requirements. This could involve tens of thousands of properties having to be notified if the proposed infrastructure was 50 kilometres long. We have had much discussion about airports. If Heathrow airport is expanded with the addition of a third runway, the number of people who will be affected must run certainly into hundreds of thousands, and possibly into millions. The relevant clauses seem to suggest that they would all have to be notified, which does not seem to me feasible. The notification process requires a written notice to be sent to each of the property owners affected. I should have thought it would be completely impossible to accomplish that with 100 per cent accuracy. If it were not 100 per cent accurate, somebody would claim in court that they should have had a notification but had not received one, and therefore the whole process would have to be quashed. I do not know quite what is intended here. It seems to me that, as the Bill stands, there is no limit to the area of notification. That seems to take one into the realms of pure impossibility. That is what lawyers tell me and that seems to me a credible interpretation. However, it may not be what the Government intend. I hope that the noble Baroness will explain this or agree to bring forward amendments at a later stage which might allay the anxieties which have been expressed.