Commons Bill [HL]

We fully appreciate the sentiment behind the amendment, which I assume is to provide for the procedure to determine applications under Clause 36 to be streamlined. The noble Baroness is right. As it happens, currently there is no formal timetable for applications for consent to undertake works under Section 194 of the 1925 Act. I am advised that straightforward applications normally take between four and six months from application to determination. Obviously, some are completed more quickly; others may take longer, especially the more complex or controversial cases or those in which a public inquiry is held. One of our objectives is to reduce the time that it takes to decide applications by modernising and updating the application process. In Clause 38, we have taken fairly wide powers that we hope will enable us to make a number of improvements to procedures—for example, by prescribing in regulation the steps to be taken by both applicants and the national authority. Whether we would want to go as far as to prescribe specific timetables for applications is open to question. Each application is individual and can raise different, sometimes complex issues that cannot always be foreseen at the start of the application process, so delays can arise for a number of reasons and at various stages of the process. I cannot immediately envisage circumstances in which it would be possible to prescribe a realistic timetable for an application unless that timetable was so flexible as to be meaningless in practice. However, fully taking the noble Baroness’s point, I am sure that administrators will want to consider that when drafting proposals to streamline the procedures. Should it be decided that a timetable for applications would serve a useful purpose, the power to do that is already contained in the clause. I refer the noble Baroness to Clause 38(2)(f), which states,"““as to the steps to be taken by the appropriate national authority upon receipt of an application””." That could well be to prescribe a timetable for determining the case. So an amendment on the lines suggested is unnecessary.