Planning Bill

It will be difficult to give a sufficient summary of what has been said and the Committee will be relieved to hear that I have no intention of trying to do so. However, one or two points need to be mentioned. The whole tenor of this debate has been about a process. It has been about consultation. The first question was: who is to be consulted? I shall not go into the answers to individual questions, except to pick up what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Judd. The national parks are planning authorities. I understand that, with a little luck, by the time we get to the end of the Bill they will have a regular place, because I believe that it is proposed that planning authorities should be the bodies to charge the community infrastructure levy. If that is the case, the planning authorities will be included at that stage, and it seems to me that those will be adequate grounds for including them everywhere else where appropriate. ““Who?”” is of course an important question. The second important question is: how is this consultation to be done? A number of questions were raised on the issue of how much faith people would have in a system of consultation run by the applicant. That leads me to the next word that I have written down: ““trust””. We have to see all of this in operation before any of us knows how it will work. The next word is ““effect””. What effect will the consultation have on the application, if any? People will have much more faith in the process if it is clear that applicants are doing their best to respond to what is said. My final question is the timescale in which all of this has to take place. All these important points have been raised in the debate, but the Minister has answered all too often, ““Guidance will be forthcoming from the Government on all these matters””. We have to answer the question to our satisfaction today without the guidance. That is one of the great difficulties that we constantly have with legislation. There is nothing that we can do about it; in the end it comes down to a question of belief. We ought to realise how significant this debate has been. Everyone who has tabled amendments will no doubt study the Minister’s response in considerable detail and with great care and will have to decide how far she has answered their concerns. There will be some interesting times ahead. I will pick up just one point made by my noble friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach, who asked that the Marine Management Organisation should be a consultee. It should be a consultee not only on things that happen in the sea. Some things that happen on land can have a dramatic effect. Any power station or cooling system on the coast consumes enormous volumes of sea water to enable it to keep running at a reasonable temperature. There is no particular problem with that except that every now and again they consume enormous numbers of fish fry—little baby things that you hardly notice drifting up and down the coast. Sometimes large proportions of fish fry stocks can go through a power station in a short period, which has a dramatic impact on stocks. Those are all important points. I am most grateful to the noble Baroness. I, like everybody else, will go away and find a cold wet towel and decide what to do. She has certainly tried to give an answer even though it cannot be satisfactory because we cannot put into the Bill what she hopes will happen. This is part of a learning process, as it will be for the whole community. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. [Amendments Nos. 177 and 178 not moved.] Clause 36 agreed to. Clause 37 [Model provisions]: