Planning Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, eloquently said almost exactly what I would have said. However, I will add one point. The pre-commencement statements were made with an entirely different purpose from that which this Bill is now enshrining in the national policy statements. They were, for instance, available to local planning authorities and to the Secretary of State, if he or she had to decide an appeal. The national policy statements are, by contrast, directed almost wholly to the Infrastructure Planning Commission. Indeed, the whole of that part of the Bill has been drawn up so as to make sure that the national policy statement is in a form fit to go before the IPC, after it has gone through all the processes, notably of consultation, local inquiry and parliamentary scrutiny. It is, therefore, for the IPC to determine any particular planning application made to it and then to decide on that application in the light of the NPS. I am sorry if I merely paraphrase what others have said. The pre-commencement statements, of course, vary hugely in their degree of detail, in the amount of consultation undertaken and in the importance that was to be attached to them when issued. I know that it is not now parliamentary to break into Latin phrases, but the lawyers would have said that they were prepared alio intuitu—with another intention. What has aroused the alarm not only here but in another place is that those statements will, in a sense, be taken as substituting for the quite elaborate procedure that the Bill sets out for approving the policy statement. I recognise at once that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and the Government have sought to allay such anxieties. However, I remain anxious, for there is scope in how the Bill is now drawn—with these amendments, if they are now accepted—for the Government to cut corners by taking an existing planning policy statement and elevating it to the status of a national policy statement. That, to my mind, is the mischief in this clause. One has dealt with these statements before: the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, will recall our arguments about underground gas storage proposals, where my complaint was that, when her department ultimately issued its decision, Mr Darling’s statement of policy was reduced to one sentence. It is inconceivable that the commission would, when considering a particular application, reduce a national policy statement to one sentence. I have been told that one of the first new NPSs that the Department of Energy and Climate Change is seeking to draft will deal with the underground storage of gas. Therefore, that particular one is starting anew. One is not expecting simply to start, as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said, with a tabula—I am sorry, I must not use Latin again—that is, with a clean sheet of paper. Of course, the department will take what has been said before as the basis for the statement, but it has to comply with the full and rigorous procedure that we have put into the Bill about parliamentary scrutiny and all the rest of it. It is not enough merely to say that the sustainability criterion must be added; much more than that will be needed. I have not combed past planning decisions to see what previous decisions were, but noble Lords in all parts of the House have expressed huge anxiety about the aviation White Paper turning itself into a national policy statement. If ever a paper was directed to an entirely different purpose than the one that we will have for national policy statements, that was it. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and his colleagues will have to make some decisions on that White Paper. What about new circumstances? The noble Lord gave an extremely interesting interview to the Times a few days ago, in which he declared his passion for high-speed rail. That echoed what my honourable friends in another place said when they addressed the conference in Birmingham; they thought that high-speed rail would be a much better alternative than having large numbers of short internal flights. I happen to agree with that. I never fly to Edinburgh; I always go by train. Is this a change of circumstance? Is it a change of circumstance that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has arrived at the Department for Transport with this new enthusiasm? This is the kind of thing that one will have to look at. If there is going to be a national policy statement for aviation, airports, new runways and all the other things, it is difficult to say that you can simply take that White Paper, dust it down, add a sustainability criterion and then say, ““Right, off we go””. That is the anxiety that I have. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, will be able to deal with it. He has met criticism from all parts of the House in trying to make sense of this clause. I hope that he, with his considerable abilities, will be able to allay our fears, but somehow I doubt it.