Localism Bill

My Lords, I have listened to my noble friend with great care. I shall clearly want to read very carefully what he has said. I realise that we asked him a number of questions for which he perhaps did not have the original briefing. I do not think that what he has said today will provide any comfort to the bodies that have been very concerned about the provisions in the Bill. The provision in Section 216 of the original 2008 Act uses the word ““includes””, but this has always been taken to mean, ““This is what it is””. The purpose of the clause of the Bill is to extend it: that is, the regulation is taken and the powers are there for ongoing expenditure—we have accepted that. However, the question is: can it be extended to something that is not infrastructure? I contend that the original intention of the Act was perfectly clear and that the answer to that has to be no. My noble friend Lord Greaves thinks that it ought to be spent on things like double glazing. I totally disagree. This is not infrastructure in any conceivable sense of the word, and therefore he put forward an amendment to say that it should be used for other forms of development. My noble friend replied to that on Monday by saying that he was going to look at it and reflect on it. The people who are really concerned with getting on with building infrastructure, and I quoted from the Institute of Civil Engineers, are really very concerned about this, because this is not what was said when the Bill was introduced in 2008. We have to be very careful. We are talking about very large sums of money. I was very grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. He made the point that some of these projects are very large. The ICE estimates that the CIL income by 2016 will be around £1 billion a year, so we are not talking about peanuts, we are talking about very large sums indeed. We have to get it right. My noble friends have said that they will consider this and, I hope, be able to meet with some of those who are genuinely concerned before we have to deal with it on Report. What is perfectly clear is that this is not a satisfactory state of affairs at the moment. I will certainly want to return to it, but in the mean time I hope that we can have a meeting to which I can bring along some of the advisers who have been helping me with this, and that we can talk to the departmental officials. It really has to be dealt with so that the position is clear. As I say, we are talking about large sums of investment money. If you are going to have investment, there has to be certainty so that people know where they stand. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 148ZZBBBA withdrawn. Amendments 148ZZBBC and 148ZZC not moved. House resumed.