Planning Bill

There are some quite serious issues in this group of amendments. I refer to government Amendment No. 438C, which refers to what the charging authority must have regard to, and to government Amendment No. 438J, which allows it to charge a nil rate. I refer also to Amendment No. 438H, tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, considering the economic impacts of the levy. Earlier, the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, said that the timing of the levy was not very good. In a private conversation that he and I had yesterday—I apologise for divulging a private conversation, but it seems to be the trend these days—we agreed that developers, entrepreneurs, businesses and the construction industry needed this levy right now like a hole in the head. I would go further than that. My area of interest is rural areas. Some rural areas are desperately in need of regeneration and development, and they will need this levy like a bullet through the head. Some remote or deprived areas do all that they can to relieve costs for new businesses and to channel government or European funding to aid development, facilitate infrastructure developments and even facilitate planning to attract new businesses and development. Even without CIL, those areas often fail to attract the businesses that they desperately need. There is perhaps a lack of trained staff; in some areas, there might be a lack of fast broadband or easy transport communication; there is probably insufficient housing for workers; or there are perhaps better places to go for businesses. All this happens even without the advent of CIL. The government paper on the levy, published in August, provided an analysis of how CIL might work in Swindon. I am sure that it would work very well there and provide much needed public funding for infrastructure; but what about some of the more deprived and remote areas, such as the south-west, including west Cornwall, west Somerset, north Devon or Torbay, or even other areas of the country, such as Wales, west Cumbria, east Lincolnshire or north Cambridgeshire? The list goes on. I expect that many of those areas will try to remain competitive by setting a nil rate. My anxiety is: what happens then? What do the partner bodies do with their demands for funds from CIL for their infrastructure? Do they say, ““In that case, we will spend our capital on infrastructure projects elsewhere?””, thus, presumably, condemning the deprived area to further, continuous and eternal deprivation? Another question mentioned earlier is: what will the Treasury do when the CIL receipts flow into the coffers of the high-charging authorities? Will it say, ““We will no longer fund infrastructure costs of this nature through the rate support grant or other agency funding””? The Treasury cannot do that for one authority and not another; presumably the remote and deprived authorities then take a further step backwards. It would seem that deprived areas will have to choose between having no development or no infrastructure—or maybe neither. I do not wish to put the Minister on the spot, but I would be very grateful if she could help me with my largely, but probably not exclusively, rural worries.