Planning Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to be able to follow the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, because I, too, want the Bill to be the right way round. I believe that most of us in this House really want the Bill to work. We desperately want to speed up our ability to respond to climate change and to invest in modern infrastructure. Of course it would be wonderful if we could wave a wand and have a high-speed rail link up the east and west coasts of Britain and it would be nice if 50 per cent of our energy came from renewable resources and fed into a modern grid et cetera—as long as it was not in my back yard, of course. For these projects, which, as I hinted, are almost certainly locally unpopular, to be implemented with minimum delay in our democratic society, we need the full authority of Parliament. I believe that, if we can achieve the full authority of Parliament behind the national policy statements, it will be perfectly acceptable for the IPC to implement and carry out the will of Parliament. If the NPSs have the full authority of Parliament and the IPC makes its judgment in the light of that authority, Parliament will have spoken, as the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, said in Committee, and the decision will be unchallengeable. However, if the decision were questioned or reversed by a set of civil servants answering for the Minister but at one remove from the detailed analysis of the project, that would be a travesty of democracy and justice and would probably hold up the projects for no good reason; it may even make them challengeable in court. Why would the Secretary of State come to a different decision, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, suggested? In my view, the Secretary of State would either be taking a decision for reasons of party politics in the constituency concerned or he or she could be ignoring the recognised and overriding local circumstances, which would have been thrashed out in public at an open hearing conducted by the IPC. Thrashing things out in public and having an open decision-making process are not synonymous with the ministerial decision-making process, with which the phrase ““behind closed doors”” seems to fit more readily. In conclusion, I believe that if we get Clause 9 right, we will not need ministerial involvement in the IPC decisions. I therefore give my full support to the Government on this issue.