Planning Bill

These amendments concern the council that is to be created within the commission. I listened with great interest to the argument which the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, put forward in support of his amendments. I shall be equally interested to hear the Minister’s response. For my part, I find the role of the council a useful one as the Bill stands. Under Clause 82, referred to in paragraph 6 of Schedule 1, a single commissioner may report on an application with the final decision being taken by the council. If I understand the role of the council correctly, it will act, in effect, as a peer review of the single commissioner’s report. It seems to me that if the council does its job well, it could be seen as a system of inbuilt checks and balances within the commission. When responding to the first group of amendments the Minister said that no single commissioner would make the final decision, which means that it must be made by a bigger group within the commission. Obviously, you cannot have the whole commission making the decision as that would be very unwieldy. Therefore, the council constitutes an effort to get a smaller group to make this decision. With that in mind I think it is appropriate that the chairman of the council should be able to exercise their powers of appointment and delegation after due consultation with the commissioners under paragraphs 7, 8 and 9. For those reasons, as the Bill stands, I regret that I do not support the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold. However, if the IPC were to only make recommendations, as is suggested in other amendments and as discussed in the first amendment, I can understand why the noble Lord tabled the amendments. The council within the commission may not be so necessary, as the final decision would be taken outside the IPC. I want to go slightly off script, because thinking about where the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, was coming from provoked me to ask, ““Why not scrap the council? What is the council for?””. There are other things, but predominantly it is to make the decision when there is a single commissioner. Then you ask why there is going to be a single commissioner. What is the IPC going to be hearing that requires only a single commissioner? The big infrastructures will be heard by a panel. Therefore, by their very nature, the smaller, more insignificant applications will be heard by a single commissioner. It rather begs the question of what sort of applications the single commissioner will be hearing. I know that the noble Baroness tried to answer that earlier. If they are so insignificant—the significant ones will be done by the panel—why can they not go through the normal planning process that we have already? The example used by the Minister when she was thinking on her feet was a road junction. That should not be for the IPC to decide; it should be for the normal planning practices that we have currently. That begs the question raised by my noble friend Lord Dixon-Smith about mission creep. ““This one is too difficult locally; let’s put it in for the IPC to decide””. At some stage, we need to know exactly what the IPC will be deciding. The small ones maybe should not be decided by a single commissioner, because they are by their very nature not significant infrastructures. That issue is raised under the amendment.