Planning Bill

I cannot conceive that any letter from my department could be uninteresting, but the fact that a letter has been sent may not mean that it was received, whether it was interesting or not. I shall look at this issue and if there has been a slip-up in my department, I shall ensure that we immediately write to the noble Baroness and copy the letter to John McDonnell. Clause 22 sets out the thresholds for which airport-related development is classed as a nationally significant infrastructure project. Amendments Nos. 135 and 137 seek to probe the sections of the Bill that deal with alterations to airports. Perhaps I may explain the position. Airport developments are already given maximum permitted uses by virtue of their planning permissions and, in the future, development consent orders will also specify maximum permitted uses. I know that the amendments are probing, but perhaps I may explore them more fully. They could inadvertently create a distinction between the permitted number of services and the services that an airport is capable of providing. This could mean that a developer might try to seek planning permission under the Town and Country Planning Act for a permitted use of fewer than 10 million passengers a year, even though the alterations themselves would make the airport capable of serving more than 10 million passengers a year. We do not believe that such a position would be justifiable. Clause 31(2)(c) states that an increase in the permitted use of an airport counts as a material change in the use of the airport. This means that an increase in the permitted use of the airport counts as ““development”” within the meaning of the Bill, and therefore development consent would be required if the increase in the permitted use exceeded the thresholds in Clause 22. I believe that that is the assurance that the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, was seeking from me. Amendment No. 158 seeks to delete that subsection, with the effect that an airport operator seeking to increase the capacity of its airport above 10 million passengers a year—or 10,000 air transport movements a year in the case of air cargo—would not have to seek development consent from the IPC. We do not believe that such an amendment is right. We wish to ensure that nationally significant airport developments are examined by the IPC, whether they are for new airports or extensions of existing airports. The noble Baronesses, Lady Hamwee and Lady Tonge, also raised in Amendments Nos. 136 and 139 the issue of why the airports threshold is expressed in terms of numbers of passengers rather than the number of air transport movements. I can tell the noble Baronesses that the Government took this approach following consultation, as we do not want the definition of a nationally significant infrastructure project airport development to be in effect a definition related to the construction of a new runway. Airport-related development may well include runway developments, as described by the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, but it could also include work to terminals which would not necessarily have an impact on the number of aeroplanes using a runway—for example, if the terminal and not the runway were the limiting factor on capacity. We believe that most reasonable people would agree that if an airport wanted to cater for an additional 10 million passengers or more per annum, the development would be of national significance irrespective of whether it needed to do development work on the runway. In respect of air freight, we used air transport movements as the definition in the Bill because, following consultation, we concluded that it was a more reliable manner of distinguishing national significance than the number of tonnes of increased traffic.