Planning Bill

I shall use this group of amendments to probe the Minister more generally as to the type of person to be appointed an IPC commissioner. I know that the next group of amendments is about a specific commissioner with design credibility and that, in her response to the previous debate, the Minister said that commissioners would be neither agents nor representatives of interests. I was glad to hear that. However, I got the impression from the discussions in the other place that the commission might be made up largely of experts in the various fields on which it would be deliberating. I have a problem with that. The trouble with experts is that they tend to be keen on their subject—so keen, in fact, that they might even appear to be biased. If you have spent all your life in the aviation industry, breathing in all the arguments rebuffing complaints about noise or carbon footprints and so on, because your job depends on them, you are less likely to take an even-handed view of the representations made to you—or, more importantly, to be seen to do so. The same might apply to nuclear experts or hydro engineers, and so on. We need the IPC to be made up of expert planners, and certainly mediators and experts in design—to which we will come—all of whom should be men and women of experience in public life. They may even require political credibility. If the IPC wants experts on the sort of project on which it is deliberating, it should be able to hire that expertise the same way that House of Lords EU sub-committees hire in expert advice when writing reports. Those experts are not part of the committee but advise it, and their advice can be taken or rejected. I would be grateful for a fuller expansion on the Minister’s views of what type of people are likely to be appointed as commissioners, because she has touched on it earlier this afternoon.