I rise to speak to the new clauses and amendments in my name and those of my hon. Friends. It is two weeks and two significant concessions to large groups of disgruntled Government Back Benchers later, but it is a pleasure to finally be back in the Chamber to conclude the Report stage of this Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris) made clear on day one of Report, in 27 sittings over a four-month period, the Bill was subject to exhaustive line-by-line consideration. Such was the appetite to participate in the Committee’s proceedings that not only was it formally adjourned to allow new members to take part, but we enjoyed appearances from seven different Ministers, some of whom even had more than a passing familiarity with the contents of the legislation.
I thank my hon. Friends the Members for York Central (Rachael Maskell), for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck) and for Coventry North East (Colleen Fletcher) and the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) for so ably scrutinising in Committee the many technical and complex provisions that the Bill contains. The new clauses and amendments that we have tabled for consideration today are almost identical to a number of those we discussed at length in Committee. That deliberate choice reflects not only the importance we place on the matters that they relate to, but the lack of anything resembling robust and convincing reassurances from Ministers in Committee in respect of the concerns that they seek to address. Indeed, if anything, the debates that took place and the responses provided by successive Ministers served only to harden our view that a number of the measures in the Bill relating to planning and the environment would almost certainly have adverse impacts.
Our hope, perhaps a forlorn one, Madam Deputy Speaker, is that the new ministerial team may have used the almost 50 days since their appointment to further interrogate the potential risks posed by those measures in the Bill that are controversial and to reflect on the wisdom of proceeding with them.
Part 3 of the Bill deals with a wide range of issues relating to both national planning policy and local and neighbourhood planning. Many of the clauses that this eclectic part contains are unproblematic, but others are contentious, and we raised detailed concerns in Committee about several of them. Amendments 78 and 79 seek to address arguably the most disquieting, namely clauses 83 and 84, concerning the future relationship between local development plans and national planning policy given statutory weight in the form of national development management policies. We welcome the fact that new section 38(5B) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 in clause 83 provides communities with greater
confidence that finalised local plans will be adhered to and any safeguards they contain respected. However, we believe that new subsection 5C in clause 83, in providing that anything covered by an NDMP will not only have legal status but will take precedence over local development plans in any instance where there is found to be a conflict between the two, represents a radical centralisation of planning decision-making that will fundamentally alter the status and remit of local planning in a way that could have a number of potentially damaging consequences.
I must make it clear that our concern in relation to the effect of this subsection would exist even if the Government had published the national planning policy framework prospectus and provided hon. Members with an overview about what NDMPs are likely to cover. The fact that they have not and that we therefore still have no idea precisely what these new statutory national policies will eventually contain—coupled with the fact that clause 84 of the Bill makes it clear that NDMPs can cover any policy area relating to development or use of land in England and can be modified or revoked without any form of consultation if that is the wish of the Secretary of State of the day—merely heightens our concerns.
We know that there is significant anxiety across the House about the future implications of NDMPs, and rightly so, because legislating to ensure that they overrule local plans in the event of any conflict does represent a radical departure from the status quo. As we argued in Committee, what is proposed is a wholly different proposition from the current application of the NPPF, and our fear is that it will lead to the erosion of local control in a way that threatens to transform what is currently a local plan-led system into a national policy-led system.