Planning Bill

I will look at the issue of the A120 and come back to the noble Lord. Perhaps I may make one comment on the noble Lord’s proposal in respect of joint committees. We have discussed with the Local Government Association ways that we can improve the balance between local and national roads. However, we are not attracted to its proposal. We are not sure that the joint committees would have the capacity to take the decisions which the noble Lord proposes to give to them. There is also one major flaw in the proposal—I can see why it is there, because I assume that the amendment was drafted lock, stock and barrel by the LGA, but it completely undermines its effectiveness—which is that no proposal can be referred to a joint committee of the kind proposed by the noble Lord unless, as subsection (4) of the proposed new clause states, "““all the local planning authorities concerned have consented to the making of the order””." The whole purpose of the proposal, which is to produce a more streamlined decision-making process where proposals involve more than one local authority, would be undermined if all those local authorities did not agree in the first instance that such a proposal could go to such a joint committee. I can understand, in light of the lowest-common-denominator way in which the LGA often works, why this part of the amendment is there, but that does not mean that it would be an effective remedy to the issues being addressed by the Bill.