Planning Bill

The noble Lord has made an excellent case for national policy statements, which will frame the decision. As he will know—and this will apply to future decisions, although I cannot comment on an individual case—the issues are always to do with matters such as safety and geological security. Those are the locational issues—the site issues—which the planning inspectors must address. They know that we need more gas storage but in this place one has to look at exactly what the consequences would be. The whole rationale behind the Bill is that there must be a way of balancing economic, environmental and social objectives that is properly considered by Ministers at the beginning of the process through the production of, consultation on and parliamentary scrutiny of national policy statements. We have created in the Bill an IPC, not because we do not think that Ministers should be involved in the process of deciding where critical infrastructure should go—far from it—but because we think that Ministers are making decisions on major infrastructure projects in the wrong place, at the wrong time and in the wrong way. We now propose that, rather than having a final appearance of a quasi-judicial sort, which is very limited, Ministers should set out infrastructure policy in a series of national policy statements which will be open to public debate and influence as well as an intensive form of parliamentary scrutiny. As I said on Second Reading, I do not think that this will be a comfortable position for Ministers. For the first time, these decisions will be transparent and able to be challenged. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, said that the plans would become out of date, which is true. But they will be plans for the long term which deal with our forecasted capacity of what we need and, should they become out of date, the Minister will review them. There is proper provision for both stability and review in the system. The plans will in some instances be locationally specific, as the Secretary of State has already made clear. There will be a debate on those specific locations as they are set out in criteria in the relevant national policy statements. There will be a full public debate, in which local authorities will be able to be fully involved. The Minister will be seen to be fully accountable in those specific NPSs. The NPSs set out the broad framework and will integrate all other relevant policies, including planning policies. They will be the subject of an appraisal of sustainability; they will be the framework in which the decisions of the IPC will be made and the criteria against which its decisions will be tested. We come now to some of the detail about how the IPC will work. I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, for saying that we are looking for a different sort of expert and a different sort of experience. I must take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Reay. These people will not be representatives; they will not be agents of interests. These 35 commissioners—the number has been assessed according to our assumptions about the workload provided by the 45 projects—will be independent experts across a wide range of competences. Some may come from planning backgrounds and some may come from the public sector in terms of project management. They will come from the range that we need to make the decisions sound and the testing of evidence substantial. We are assuming that most projects will be considered and decided by a panel of three to five commissioners, with less complex cases, such as uncontroversial works to the strategic road network, for example, decided by a single commissioner. But the decisions will be made in those cases by a council of at least five commissioners; no single commissioner will take the final decision. There will be timetables for completing examinations and taking decisions. On the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, our best guess is still that the number of major projects will be about 45 a year. There may be some variation regarding the balance of projects but we still think that that is a sound estimate. The noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, asked about costings. We expect the one-off costs of the IPC to be £5 million; we expect the cost of running it to be £9.3 million each year; and we expect an average cost of £300 million per year—£4.8 billion by 2030—because there will be such a significant fall in the time taken by the process. Those costs are in the RIA. The IPC will be able to take into account any other matters that it considers important and relevant, but it will be independent. It will be able to reject any application if it thinks that the local impact will result in the adverse effects outweighing the benefits. It will have to set out reasons for reaching its decisions. It will be focused on local impacts and will look at the more technical issues concerning specific sites and schemes in the sort of detail that generally I believe our planning inquiries have not been able to do so far. Noble Lords have referred to the commission as unaccountable. The fact that it is unelected does not mean that it is unaccountable. It will operate within the clear constraints set by Parliament; it will only ever determine applications within the very clear policy statements set out in the NPS. The commission will be appointed by and need to report on its performance to the Secretary of State. The most senior appointments will be subject to pre-appointment hearings by a Select Committee. In fact, they will be among the first public appointments to be subjected to this process. The commission will have to set out in full the reasons for its decisions. It can be challenged in the courts if it is thought to have acted unreasonably. As the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, said, we are not advocating anything completely new. He listed some sound analogies in relation to the relative role of Ministers. I hope that noble Lords will take away their amendments and think again about some of the issues that have been raised in this debate. I should like to address the amendments specifically and some of the issues that have arisen. Amendment No. 1 would require the IPC to be a recommending rather than a decision-making body. I have set out at some length why we think that the IPC needs to be a decision maker in a much tougher and more challenging world in relation to infrastructure. If it were only a recommending body, much of the logic and the advantages, as well as the savings in time, would be lost. We would lose transparency and efficiency. I cannot accept the proposal that it should be a recommending body. I have serious doubts about whether it should make its recommendations to Parliament. Where Parliament and the House fit in is a serious issue, which we will come back to when debating later amendments. I refer the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, to Clause 9, which provides for resolutions of this House to be taken into account by the Government. I am sure that we will come back to that at a later stage. I do not see, as other noble Lords have said, how Parliament can cope with this. How would it review the evidence, for example, as my noble friend Lord Woolmer asked? This would take Parliament into another area of policy, and planning policy at that. There are major issues, which we would need to consider very carefully before we went along with that proposal. Amendment No. 2 relates to mission creep. The Bill clearly states that the IPC can deal only with applications for development consent for nationally significant infrastructure projects. They are defined in Clauses 14 to 29, which set out the specific thresholds. The Bill allows us to change those, but only with the approval of Parliament. That strikes the right balance between flexibility and safeguards. Amendment No. 3 relates to confirmation. I have a problem with the language. As the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, said, Ministers could not simply rubber-stamp a decision. The integrity of the process would lie in a Minister’s ability to review, which would inevitably mean reviewing evidence and the way in which judgments were made. That would be bound to add a significant delay of at least six months while parties waited for the Minister to decide whether to confirm the decision. Worse still, it would add another layer of uncertainty for promoters. A community might be waiting for a new reservoir for water security, for instance, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young, mentioned. The IPC would examine the case and reach a decision. There would then be another stage to go through. If Ministers were take the final decisions on applications, however described, there would also be an incentive for them to reopen the political debate. We would have gone almost full circle. It would raise serious doubts about the extent to which national need could be excluded from those inquiries and decisions, as well as the greater risk of sequential challenges, first to the IPC’s decision and then to that of the Minister, which would undermine transparency. As the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said, the point of establishing the IPC, which is an expert group of people who will make their decisions in public, with written and oral evidence tested out and new stages for floor hearings, is to provide a huge advantage to the local community and to give it access that it has not previously had. Amendment No. 4 suggests that the IPC should be put back on virtually the same basis as the Planning Inspectorate. I think that I have argued sufficiently why we need a new system. The Planning Inspectorate is not independent; it is an arm of government. It provides a superb service, but it does not do what we would want the IPC to do. I recommend that noble Lords read the evidence given by the Planning Inspectorate when the Bill started its process through the House of Lords. Establishing an independent commission is vital. It is essential to improving speed, efficiency and transparency; it is essential to meeting the scale and the urgency of the task that we face; it is essential to ensuring open, high-quality decisions; and it is essential to the transparency of the system. I hope that, on the basis of that argument, noble Lords will not press their amendments. I apologise for speaking at such length, but these issues run through the course of the Bill.