Planning Bill

My Lords, to follow what my noble friend Lord Reay said, it has often been said that the Government have three connected Bills. The Climate Change Bill, the Energy Bill—to which we bade farewell last night, I hope—and this Bill all have broadly the same objective. Therefore, I hope that noble Lords will not consider it inappropriate if I refer to something we discussed during the passage of the Energy Bill, which refers precisely to the point made by my noble friend Lord Reay. When we were looking at the contribution that wind farms—offshore as well as onshore—should make to achieving our environmental objectives, it was said again and again that it was being held up not by the inability of the regulators to provide the necessary financial flexibility, and certainly not by any reluctance on the part of investors to invest in wind farms, but by two other factors. The first is access to the grid, on which I will not say another word because that is not directly applicable today, and the second is the planning system. The other day I saw an article about wind energy in a newspaper supplement headed: ““Where are the wind farms? Blame the councillors””. It is well known that a great many wind farm applications are pending because they have fallen foul of the planning system. The difficulty for the Government and the IPC is how to break through the barrier to achieving the production of the amount of renewable energy to which the Government have committed themselves, while protecting precisely the kind of thing described by my noble friend and on which there has been so much debate. The place to do it is in the national planning statements. They should make it clear to those who are going to make applications based on a national planning statement for energy—I do not know how many statements there will be; one overarching statement for energy and perhaps others for more specific areas of energy—that they have to have regard to the aesthetic and human values related to these issues as well as the need to press ahead with achieving our environmental objectives. That is why I want to speak strongly in favour of these amendments, although I am not particularly wedded to the actual wording. If we are going to make sense of our energy policy we will do so not only by paying attention to the climate change legislation, but also by paying attention to this legislation. Let me say this to the Minister: I do not envy the officials who will have to draw up national policy statements which are going to have regard to these multifarious objectives. However, we cannot go on with applications simply being held up indefinitely because of the opposition of local planning authorities. That is what this legislation is supposed to be about: major infrastructure projects of national significance, and no one can deny that wind farms fall firmly into that category. Here is a classic example of how all three parts of the legislative structure Parliament is now putting in place actually hang together. I cannot sit down without telling a story that the noble Lord, Lord Chorley, may well remember because it relates to a wind farm he was concerned with in Cumbria. A cartoon in one of the papers showed a man rushing in and waving a piece of paper at his wife, saying, ““We’ve won! We’re not going to have a wind farm, we’re going to get a nuclear power station instead””.