Planning Bill

moved Amendment No. 64: 64: After Clause 31, insert the following new Clause— ““Heritage In considering whether to designate a statement as a national policy statement or in considering whether to grant development consent which affects a listed building, scheduled monument, conservation area or a registered park, garden or battlefield, the Secretary of State or, as the case may be, the Commission shall have special regard to the desirability of preserving such assets, their settings or any features of special interest which they possess.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, in Committee the Minister, my noble friend Lady Andrews, assured us that there was no intention on the part of the Government not to carry forward into the new regime for planning nationally significant infrastructure the existing legislative protections for the heritage. In that case, there is little, if any, difference between her objectives and mine. I am most grateful to her for allowing me to meet her in the department and for the care that she has taken to explain her position to me. Having reflected carefully on all that she said, however, and having taken expert advice, I remain unpersuaded that the Bill succeeds in carrying forward those protections adequately. I am fortified in this view by the consultations that I have had with leading heritage organisations. Having spoken to the National Trust, the Historic Houses Association and Heritage Link, which represents the voluntary heritage sector, I have found that they all share my view that the Bill as it is, and the assurances so far given, fail to provide sufficiently robust protection for the heritage. They have all written to me confirming this, and I understand that each of the organisations has made its own representations to the Secretary of State. Sir Patrick Cormack MP, on behalf of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Arts and Heritage, has also written to the Secretary of State expressing the same anxiety. Subsections (5) and (6) of Clause 102 require the commission to comply with existing laws. These existing laws, however, are not general but specific to the exercise of existing planning controls. The laws in question are the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 and the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979. They apply only to the existing planning consent regime. This Bill, of course, creates a new development consent regime—a separate sphere of planning law and policy for nationally significant infrastructure projects—which the existing regime does not control. Indeed, Clause 33 specifically disapplies the protections for the heritage in the 1979 and 1990 Acts. My noble friend has offered the comfort that the Government intend to replicate the test set out in Sections 66 and 72 of the 1990 Act in the decision test in Clause 102 for the IPC and in Clause 103 for the Secretary of State. Clause 102(2)(c) gives the Secretary of State power to make regulations prescribing matters to which the IPC must have regard. Clause 103(2)(b) provides the same power for cases when the Secretary of State is the decision-maker. In Committee on 8 October, my noble friend said: "““We intend that in considering whether to grant development consent that would affect a listed building, the IPC shall have special regard to the desirability of preserving the building or its setting or any features of special architectural or historic interest which it possesses, and likewise for cases of major projects which affect scheduled monuments and conservation areas. To make that clear we intend to prescribe these matters in the decision test under the powers already in Clause 101(2)(c)””,—[Official Report, 8/10/08; col. 293.]" which is now Clause 102(2)(c). In those words my noble friend drew on the language of the 1990 Act, as I have done in my proposed new clause. My noble friend also told us in Committee that the Government were about to revise planning policy guidance 15 on the historic environment and PPG16 on archaeology, unifying them into one planning policy statement, which, "““will in turn feed into the national policy statements and will be taken account of in IPC decisions””.—[Official Report, 8/10/08; col. 291.]" Those assurances are welcome and to an extent, valuable. I regret, however, that I do not draw sufficient comfort from them. Regulations do not offer the same solidity of protection as statute. They can all too easily be altered by government or discarded. Parliament has no capacity to amend regulations; they are not subject to the same scrutiny as Bills; and they are rarely rejected. There could be enormous pressure to sweep aside anything as inconvenient as heritage when it stands in the path of proposed development, backed by powerful economic interests and other government departments that are not squeamish about heritage. Previous Governments have taken the view that protection of the historic environment is so important that it should be enshrined in statute and not left effectively to the discretion of the Secretary of State. My noble friend made no specific mention in Committee of protection of registered parks, gardens and battlefields. At present they enjoy varying levels of protection. Parks and gardens are currently designated under a statutory scheme set out in Section 8C of the Historic Buildings and Ancient Monuments Act 1953. PPG15 says that preserving them should be a material planning consideration. It says the same about battlefield sites, although there is currently no statutory protection for them. My noble friend has not promised new regulations to fill the void in protection of parks and gardens that the Bill would create. Instead, she has suggested that my proposed new clause would move us beyond maintaining current levels of protection and that, while she sympathises with that desire, she does not think it appropriate to do so in this Bill, using it to restructure or undermine a settlement that has been carefully worked out over time. My response is that the Government have made it clear that that is exactly what they mean to do in the Heritage Protection Bill, which they have published in draft. In it, the Government have put forward their policy to extend the statutory duty to protect beyond listed buildings to other heritage assets in a new, unified system. The scope of the new unified system of designation and protection would include what are termed in the draft Bill ““heritage open spaces”” defined to include parks, gardens and battlefields. We hope that the Heritage Protection Bill will be in the Government’s legislative programme for the next Session, but that is by no means a certainty. If it is included, the legislation will not be on the statute book for a year; if it is not, it may then not appear on the legislative programme for some years, if ever. I also need to make the point that the Planning Bill and the Heritage Protection Bill ought to be consistent with each other. The development consent regime ought to be consistent with the Government’s policy on protection of the historic environment. The Planning Bill ought, therefore, to frame its provisions concerning heritage protection on the basis of the unified system that the Government proclaim they intend to bring in by means of the Heritage Protection Bill. If not, policy will be confused, and parks, gardens and battlefields will not be protected in the same way as other very important parts of our heritage. My proposed new clause would reconcile the two Bills. There is one more point that I want to emphasise. In my desire, which is widely shared as our debate in Committee demonstrated, to protect the heritage in the face of the extraordinarily powerful forces of development that the Bill foretells, I am not seeking to be intransigent or unreasonable. The proposed new clause requires only that the Secretary of State and the commission shall have special regard to the desirability of preserving heritage assets. It does not require that, when preservation of the heritage is in conflict with infrastructure development, heritage must prevail. My case is that heritage should never be destroyed without the most careful weighing of the costs and benefits. We need new infrastructure, we need faster processes for taking decisions, but we also need to guard against destroying heritage casually. We need speed of decision-taking, but not poverty of decision-taking. There is an immense amount at stake here for the heritage. This proposed new clause does no more than what the Government have said they want to do. It introduces into the new regime existing protections for heritage, and it enacts some additional protection that has already been proclaimed by the Government in a draft Bill as their policy. It does these things more surely and completely than the Government have so far proposed. I beg to move.