Planning Bill

It is incredibly reassuring to know that noble Lords do not need a Minister to answer questions. On many of the issues that we have discussed, we could have done without anyone at the Dispatch Box. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, has provided an opportunity to discuss the role to the council and I congratulate him on his assiduousness in drawing the amendments together. I have sympathy in terms of the potential confusion that the term ““the council”” raises. Although I cannot get rid of the concept of the council, because it is important in concept and in practice, I am happy to discuss what we meant. In fact, that has already ably been done by the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, in rather better language when he talked about peer review, because that is part of this. As one looks at the need for collective judgment, one can see a role for these groups of people. Why have we put forward this organisational model? The term ““council”” is understood to be a permanent and fixed group of people who undertake what is usually a supervisory function. The concept of the council as set out in paragraphs 6 to 10 of Schedule 1 is not that at all. It is not a layer of bureaucracy, but an important part of ensuring that the right decisions are made in the right way, with the right sort of expertise and judgment available. I do not wish to reiterate what was said earlier, but essentially we have been talking about the IPC consisting of about 35 commissioners of different skills. At various times the chair and the deputy chair will be able to draw upon that expertise in different ways. They will need to be able to bring people with particular skills for particular purposes—and sometimes for different purposes. Those groupings of between five and nine commissioners will, in effect, be the councils of the commission. The main task of these small groups will be to take the final decision on any application which has been decided in the first instance by a single commissioner. I resist the temptation to try to explain even more clearly than I did earlier about the example of the road junction. I will write to noble Lords, because it is important to spell out that issue. However, the noble Lord was not quite accurate. The single commissioner will bring a report and recommendation to the relevant council of commissioners for their final judgement. Regarding the point of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, the collective wisdom of the council can be applied to other roles. A council of relevant commissioners will also advise the chair in the first instance as to whether it is appropriate for a single commissioner to take the application, or whether, in light of the complexity of the issue, a panel of three commissioners is needed to take the decision. If appropriate, we can envisage a fixed group of commissioners who might be appointed to decide a particular category of infrastructure—for example, highway cases. In addition, different groups of commissioners with a combination of skills might be appointed on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps I may give an example of how I think it will work, bearing in mind that the implementation process is very much in its early days. Let us assume that a developer brings forward an application for a port development. The chair, or delegated deputy chair, looking at the range of expertise and experience in the 35 commissioners, might have already put together a council of the most appropriate people to decide in the first instance how the application should be treated. If the decision is that the application can safely be left to a single commissioner, the same council would in all probability take a final decision. The case would be referred to it by the single commissioner on recommendation. I said ““probably”” because we cannot set this in stone. It will be for the common sense and judgment of the chair and deputy chair to decide how this works. The council that makes the final decision could, indeed, include different commissioners if that were appropriate. If the decision is that the case needs three commissioners to scrutinise complex matters of evidence and so on, those three commissioners could be drawn from the same council. But that need not necessarily be the case if other people with particular skills were needed on that panel. The result will be not the fixed concept of a single council but a series of small councils, sitting at any one time and undertaking different functions. The benefit is that that will produce the opposite of the rigid bureaucracy that one could imagine would be created if everything had to be referred upwards to a single council of 35 commissioners. This allows flexibility and fluidity, and it allows the expertise of commissioners to be moved around. They can be deployed more fluidly and that, in turn, will ensure that they are as effective as possible. It allows for proportionate action and decisions in relation to the relative complexity of the applications, and it allows the maximum use of resources. In short, it gives us better value for money. As I said, if there were to be a fixed council, I would have some sympathy with the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, because it would be rigid and a waste of time and talent. In this way, the most appropriate skills can be marshalled in relation to different development projects, and there will be collective judgment in instances where a single commissioner has been charged with the initial decision. This combination means that we will have high-quality, impartial decisions, and the appropriate skills will be applied as and when necessary. I hope that that satisfies the Committee that this is a sensible and proportionate way to proceed with the IPC.