Planning Bill

Part of the problem with the amendment, however, is that it would also have an adverse impact on the blight provisions set out in Clause 168(6), which define ““appropriate authority”” for the purposes of Chapter 2 of Part VI of the Town and Country Planning Act. The amendments would create some confusion about the responsibility for any blight caused by the national policy statement. That is one reason why we have the provision. The amendment would have the unintended consequence that responsibility for any blight caused by the NPS would fall upon the Secretary of State, rather than upon the statutory undertaker, who would provide the infrastructure and would therefore be expected to purchase the land in due course. This is clearly very technical, and I would prefer the security of being able to write and pursue this in some detail, if that is acceptable. Amendments Nos. 44 and 47 seek to specify that when setting out criteria for deciding suitability of a location or identifying suitable locations for particular development, NPSs may take into account amount, type and size of proposed development. I think that the noble Baroness was seeking to tighten the definition of what should be taken into account and she asked me whether that was, indeed, the burden of this. Clause 5(5) is permissive. Although it is not explicitly set out in the Bill, NPSs may already take account of such detail when setting out criteria for deciding suitability of location or identifying suitable locations for particular development. Actually setting out those sorts of criteria will meet the noble Baroness’s concerns there. I address briefly the issue of location specificity. Ministers made a commitment in the other place that both nuclear and aviation NPSs would be location-specific policy statements. That was partly to make it clear that Ministers, when they took account of the views of Parliament and the public, would take difficult decisions regarding which locations would be suitable for development in those areas. My right honourable friend Hazel Blears said on Report that the, "““statements that cover nuclear power stations and airport development—the two most contentious forms of development covered by the Bill—will be location specific””.—[Official Report, Commons, 25/06/08; col. 348.]" The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, described why the locations of nuclear power stations would be in all logic constrained by a number of different factors. More choices are to be made with other NPSs. Clearly the NPS itself will not be as locationally specific, but it will set out criteria about the types of locations that might be suitable for the development of NSIPs. The terms ““suitable”” and ““potentially suitable”” are virtually interchangeable. They highlight that the suitability itself might be conditional on external factors. One cannot set out specific criteria for these situations in all cases. The NPSs must be rational and sensible documents. In all cases we expect the identification of the suitability of a location to be ultimately dependent on the details of the particular project proposal. It would be one of the tasks of the IPC. The IPC would have to look closely at the details. I am addressing Amendment No. 46 in this context. It would have to look at the specific application and the precise siting of potential impacts to determine whether the application was appropriate to go in the place identified. In some cases it is possible that the suitability of a location identified in an NPS was conditional and not simply on the details of the particular application. There would be other factors as well—for example, we might find that there was a location that was suitable for an airport. That might depend on whether the air quality was of a satisfactory standard regardless of the details of the other aspects of the project actually fitting the other sets of criteria. The flexibility that these terms give us is important.