My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Judd and the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for tabling these amendments. In terms of their underlying principle and the issues that have been raised, I have a great deal of sympathy with them. I was involved in the campaign to secure the Countryside and Rights of Way Act. I am a strong believer in the need to preserve our biodiversity and natural environment and the amenity of our unique landscapes. Both noble Lords were very eloquent in defending those unique and priceless assets, as they have been described, and raised interesting questions. I look forward to hearing the response from the Minister.
The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, highlighted the fact that we have considerable amounts of information in the public domain which guide where energy projects are located. Those are the national policy statements on planning, which are, as the noble Lord mentioned, considerable in their breadth and depth.
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I do not think that, in anything that we want to do here, we would want to duplicate or undermine that process. There were some very interesting questions raised about the precise nature of the relationship between this new requirement to produce a strategy policy statement and those existing statements. We look forward to hearing responses on whether the statement that we are discussing here, in this Bill, would be a material consideration in planning.
As we move forward to a new energy system with a very different profile from the one that we have today, there are going to be trade-offs. We must try to be
guided by what is sensible for current and future generations. There is no single source of energy that does not have an impact, whether on the global or local environment, or anything in between. So it is always going to be a question of trade-offs; all we can hope is that we use the most sensible advice available to us and act within the law and all the frameworks that exist to guide our decision-making process. I am confident—and I hope that the Minister will reassure us—that the SPS will take into account that legal framework within which we must operate and be explicit about how the strategy is shaped and formed by those protections, which have been hard fought for and valued by wider society.