Planning Bill

My Lords, we have three amendments in this group. I support what underlies the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley—it also underlies my Amendment No. 88—although local authorities are going to have a pretty short time. It is right to ensure that interested parties have opportunities to comment but I would not want any constraints to result from the shortening of deadlines, which would make the process more difficult. My Amendment No. 88 would provide that, "““written representations shall be published on receipt by the Examining Authority””." The words ““on receipt”” may be a bit too restrictive, but I hope that this will prompt the Minister to tell us that regulations will have something to say about this. Currently—I keep saying ““currently””, as if we are abolishing the whole of the current process, but of course we are not—in the non-IPC regime, objectors, supporters and applicants have a chance to see the other representations that are made, which makes the process open and inclusive. I believe that that should be replicated in the IPC process. Amendments Nos. 96 and 97 take us to the interpretation section for this chapter. My noble friend Lord Greaves talked about county and district councils at the last stage of our proceedings at a different point in the Bill, although it was under this chapter. He raised a point about the punctuation. The Bill refers to, "““a county council, or district council,””." My noble friend rightly questioned the significance of the commas. I notice that when Hansard reported the debate, it did not use commas, saying, "““a local authority means a county council or a district council in England””.—[Official Report, 16/10/08; col. 903.]" It may have known something that we did not. The Minister acknowledged that there might be some ambiguity and said that she was concerned to ensure that no unnecessary confusion was caused by the punctuation. It is confusing, but, more than that, for all the purposes of Chapter 4, local authorities should mean both county councils and district councils. Of course, if there is only a unitary, then it is that unitary that, in most cases, will be regarded as a district authority. Where there are two tiers, then both tiers should be involved.