Planning Bill

moved Amendment No. 89: 89: Clause 92, page 48, line 3, after ““representations”” insert ““and call evidence”” The noble Viscount said: My Lords, I must start by apologising for not being in my place last Thursday when this group of amendments was called. I was not consulted about the grouping, and was therefore receiving some extremely useful education on a recondite point that arises under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. I am not sure that I am all that much wiser, but it was well worth doing. I also wish the Minister to understand that I am not trying, in what I am about to say, to go back to the days of interminable planning inquiries. I participated in many of those and entirely appreciate the purpose of the system being introduced in the Bill. Nevertheless, I am not alone in wondering about the process of the examination of these large and important matters. The Government have already made the concession about having an advocate to the authority, a point that I wished to raise, but perhaps it goes a little beyond that. The word that Ministers use perpetually in this connection is ““representations””. In the planning world, those are pretty lowly objects: the lowest form of trying to say something about a planning application. I do not think that is what is meant. We have just heard about interested parties from the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and that is much more important. Interested parties are not always people who just want the project to go away so that it does not affect them—although there are many who do. There are some who really do challenge some of the technical aspects of the project for good reason, and they wish to bring evidence to establish their case. There is not a word in anything that has been said so far about evidence or witnesses from people who want to make representations about a project. I shall give just two examples. Noble Lords will all know about the City Airport, which was built in the Royal Albert Docks only after a very strict noise regime was worked out by a very skilful acoustics expert. It may have been modified as time has gone by, but it would never have happened if it had not been subject to conditions that imposed limits on the sort of aircraft, the time of flight and that type of thing. Those were conditions attached to the planning consent, which would now be requirements in the terminology of this Bill. I do not know how many of your Lordships have been involved in any detail in the subject of noise, but it is a very technical subject that requires a most skilled appreciation of the various techniques and various aspects of it before a sensible conclusion can be reached. I have no doubt that in one of the airport projects that are going to be specified in the national plan there will be different methods of building a runway, a terminal or whatever it may be. These will need to be tested, not least perhaps in terms of the creation of noise and the disturbance to the immediate vicinity. I suppose that there will be skilled members of the panel with a good grounding in noise—although I am bound to say that I doubt it, as it is a very technical subject and not many people know about it. The other proposition that I wish to be considered is the major highway project. It could be a railway project, but I shall take as an example a highway project. It will be a big scheme, as defined in the Bill, and there will probably be proposed, as there usually are, a number of alternative routes, which have to be considered at the examination. People putting forward the alternative routes will probably wish to challenge the assumptions on the basis of which the chosen route was proposed, which often involves the consideration of a traffic model. I myself have been involved in a number of public inquiries using computer models and, although the model itself is only a short line of algebra, the inputs to the various factors in it make all the difference. If you change them around or alter them in a small way, it can make a colossal difference to the end result. What is more, the model is then iterated through the computer, so that you have an aggregation of the effects of it—and, of course, if you go too far, the aggregation is such that the thing becomes completely intolerable. Therefore, you have to have some judgment about when you stop the iterative process. Are members of the panel going to be able to involve themselves with sufficient knowledge to do that sort of testing? Probably not. It took me a fortnight to do that sort of testing at the London School of Economics when we challenged the four ring-roads in the Greater London development plan. Those four ring-roads included the M25, which was already there; the other three never materialised, because there was something wrong with the models. I do not say that it was entirely due to me, but it was found that they should not be built—and they still have not been built. It was a very difficult proposition to grasp, which is why I want to go a little further into the process of the examination. In such circumstances, there could very properly be an advocate to the authority who will help with this sort of thing, but how is he going to get his instructions? If no one on the panel understands the matter, who else is going to tell him what questions to ask and what points need to be tested? That is why in the amendment, which I shall not move but which is still in the Marshalled List, I wrote ““assessors””. The High Court can appoint an advocate to the court and assessors if there is a technical matter that needs to be considered. It would of course be the assessor who gave the instruction to the advocate, and between them they would be able to work out the aspects of the proposition that need to be examined and tested so that the best result ensues. No method mentioned so far will deal with that sort of complication. These are not ““representations”” but extremely skilled technical pieces of evidence, which will be put forward. They deserve to be treated with some respect and to be taken into account properly. Nothing I have seen so far indicates that that sort of process will take place, so I should like the Minister’s help to ensure that it will be properly dealt with. If it is not properly dealt with, there may be a judicial review, because the panel or the authority will be said not to have taken into account properly some of the things that it should have taken into account. If, on the other hand, it is left to a member of the panel to test these technical matters and he or she does not know enough about it to do it properly—or tries to do so, and then the panel comes down against the person objecting to the technical proposition that has been put forward—there will be a judicial review on the grounds of bias. It will be said that the panel decided beforehand, in the questions that were asked, which of the two propositions it prefers. We have heard enough about judicial review in the proceedings of this Bill to know that we want to try to avoid that if we possibly can. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, talked about it last Thursday in relation to national strategic plans. We need to ensure that the actual process of the examination of an individual application is also proof, except in unusual circumstances, against challenge by judicial review, because that is not only long term but expensive and may mean that the whole thing is defeated. I have not heard enough about this, and I am not the only person who is concerned. The current chairman of the planning Bar has spoken to me and other members of the House, including the Minister, raising these points. I am not asking to revert to the old form of massive planning inquiries, which take forever and ever, but these things are sufficiently difficult to require the right people with the right expertise to take part in the process. That is what my amendments are all about. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us that that will take place because, even if it is not on the face of the Bill, what she says in this House will be a valuable guide to those setting up the examination and those conducting it. I beg to move.