My Lords, I have an amendment in this group. It is a very important subject and it is a great pity that it has come up at this late hour. I quite understand why my noble friend wished to move it.
Under Article 4, for example, which is recommended on the process we were discussing earlier, you cannot charge fees in those circumstances. You cannot even charge the prior approval application fee. So in those cases, if we had not had that system, we would have been able to get fees of £380,000, whereas we actually got only £19,000 from all this work—on 234 prior approval cases. I do not want to go over all that again; it just accentuates the problem. I agree with my noble friend. I do not see why local authorities should not be permitted to recover the cost of this service.
In our authority, it costs us £1 million to provide this service. That is money that has to be cross-subsidised. So, in effect, while we are being told that we have to charge up to the level—charging old people full price for their services and so forth—developers and people who want to do extensions do not have to pay. The only people who are told that they must be subsidised are developers. It is in fact a pernicious cross-subsidy from adult social services and other key services into providing a cost on planning that is not the true cost.
This is not the occasion to have a long debate, but it is unacceptable that local authorities are not allowed to recover at least that cost—I would not be as ambitious as my noble friend. This is a matter that we must return to.