Planning Bill

moved Amendment No. 117B: 117B: Clause 14, page 7, line 35, leave out paragraph (g) The noble Lord said: This group of amendments, including Amendment No. 117B and the Question whether Clause 21 shall stand part, was inspired by the Local Government Association. The problem with the highways definition of what is appropriate as national infrastructure is that it is too narrow, too limited and perhaps not appropriate. Roads where the Government are the highways authority are not necessarily of national significance. Some of the projects undertaken on those roads are certainly not of national significance. When one qualifies that, there are questions as to whether the definition is sufficiently wide, but I shall come to that later. The Local Government Association is particularly concerned about this definition. Amendment No. 117B would introduce a new clause to allow highway projects whose impact is sub-national to be devolved to a council or a group of councils. The projects may be on roads where the Secretary of State is the highway authority, but very often the impact of projects on those roads is essentially sub-regional. Obviously, the Secretary of State would still have the power to designate a highway application as a national infrastructure project under Clause 34, but that would probably remove some of the projects from the Infrastructure Planning Commission and put them back into the normal planning system, which is where the real concern of the Local Government Association lies. It is concerned that this expeditious, but slightly more remote, methodology is inappropriate for dealing with more local projects. Amendment Nos. 168A and 168B would deal with highway projects which were not so designated. Amendment No. 168A would remove the Secretary of State’s ability to call in highway applications, except in relation to national parks. Amendment No. 168B would enable the Secretary of State to require local authorities to form joint committees to deal with trans-boundary highway applications. The current drafting means that any scheme involving the construction, improvement or alteration of a road for which the Secretary of State is the highway authority falls automatically to the IPC. The Local Government Association does not accept that that is appropriate in all cases. We thought that this was worth, at the very least, taking a bit of the Minister’s time—I am pleased to welcome him here to answer these questions—because the Local Government Association is rightly the defender of local interest. Amendment No. 134A deals with the problem in a different way. It puts in an arbitrary cost limit below which a project might be considered local and above which one would consider it to be national. That would have the virtue of simplicity and would not impose the sort of administrative procedures which the previous amendments imply. It might be considered that the figure of £250 million is wrong, but the amendment was tabled with the intention of trying to provide a simpler way of defining a national project. I gave notice to the noble Baroness that I intended to raise another issue in relation to these highway projects which seems to have escaped the scope of the Bill altogether, and that is Trans-European Road Network projects, which are designated by Brussels. I have to declare a marginal interest in that a TERN road runs through the middle of my farm, and which happens to be my main farm track. It is also the A120, a single-carriageway road that goes straight through one village. The traffic count is over 23,000 vehicles per day, which translates to one vehicle passing every five seconds 24/7. That is an extraordinary state of affairs. There is a project for a relief road, the price of which has risen to over £500 million for almost 10 miles of road. If there was ever a case of the best being the enemy of the good, this is it; but because it is not a national road, the improvement cost has to come out of the local budget. The regional budget for highways improvement is £100 million per annum. That road will never be built, and the people of the village will never get relief. The more important issue is this: the Trans-European Road Network is a Brussels designation and of course has nothing to do with our national policy, but these roads are supposed to provide better transport links across the continent of Europe. Of course we are not on the continent, but the route I refer to is supposed to link the Haven ports in the east of Essex with Ireland. That may sound amazing, but it is the purpose of the original designation. So we have a classification of infrastructure projects designated by Brussels of which we apparently take no notice. There is at least a question here of whether projects on TERN routes ought not to be national infrastructure projects. If that were the case, given the existing financial situation it would make not a ha’peth of difference to the timing of that necessary road improvement, but it might facilitate it if and when budgetary conditions eventually become easier. I beg to move.