Housing and Regeneration Bill

moved Amendment No. 68A: 68A: Clause 13, page 5, line 13, leave out paragraph (b) and insert— ““(b) the condition in subsection (2) is met.”” The noble Lord said: As it stands, Clause 13 on designation orders covers two areas—planning functions, which we have been discussing for the past hour and a half, and highways functions. My purpose is to take out all reference to highways functions and to remove Clauses 15, 16 and 17. These highways functions are the adoption of private streets and appeals against them, and traffic regulation orders on private streets. It is not clear at all why the HCA should have such powers, even in a designated area. Highways authorities have expertise in these matters. They employ staff who know about them and can happily deal with them, even if the HCA has some or all of the planning functions for the designated areas. Putting these functions in the hands of the HCA would result in it taking on extra staff to duplicate what the highways authorities do already. That seems to be very inefficient. If all this is to take place in the spirit of partnership and co-operation, it is not clear at all why the highways authority cannot do in designated areas what it would do in any other areas. The purpose of my amendment is to find out why the Government feel it is necessary to give these extra powers to the HCA. Perhaps the Minister could confirm my suspicion that this is legacy legislation that goes back quite a long way to 1993 or 1990, but I suspect that it goes back to the days before local government reorganisation in 1974, when a large number of authorities dealt with this very local highways function. Many small authorities and county councils would have devolved this kind of issue to urban districts and so on and the situation might have been complex and messy. That is not the case now. We are talking about quite large authorities—which grow larger by the year as the Government slowly reorganises into bigger authorities—which are either large counties, large boroughs or unitary authorities and which have plenty of expertise and specialist staff for dealing with this kind of thing. It is not right to encourage the HCA to set up new departments with new staff and to do it itself. I beg to move.