Planning Bill

I shall speak to my amendment, which would leave out Clause 151. I put this amendment down some time ago and, later, I had the unusual experience of finding that the Minister had added her name to mine. In due course, I discovered that the Government have found something with which to replace it. I will now have to decide whether that will be a sufficient improvement on what was there before. I was disturbed by Clause 151. As I think the noble Baroness explained, it was a last-minute addition to the Bill in another place as the result of a Back-Bench amendment which the Government accepted. It seems, however, to remove a basic human right to mount a legal challenge on the grounds of nuisance to any authorised development. No local council, for example, would any longer have been able to act on complaints from local people regarding nuisance caused by light, smell, flicker from wind turbines or noise in respect of any development once permission had been given for it to go ahead. It so happens that infrastructure projects in the field of transport including aviation already enjoy, I believe, statutory protection from nuisance claims. What this clause would have done was to confer on energy and hazardous waste projects the same degree of protection. That would include electricity generating stations, some of which are small projects. The noble Baroness said that the big decisions would now be taken up-front and put that forward as a justification, but the threshold for onshore wind projects is set at 50 megawatts, which means 15 megawatts of annual production of electricity generated and suggests that they are only one-hundredth the size of a normal nuclear power station. They cannot be considered to be big projects. It is not possible to list in statute all potential nuisances. ““Nuisance”” is a common law term and new nuisances arise all the time. In the case of wind turbines, some of the effects on nearby residents are only now coming to light and being recognised. Rulings have been made under existing legislation, and one can expect a growing rate of challenges and rulings as the number of development applications increases. In one case, a judge found that a property had decreased in value by 20 per cent following the erection of wind turbines nearby. In another case last July, the Lincolnshire Valuation Tribunal ruled that the authorities in Spalding had erred in not reducing the council tax banding of a house which was situated within one kilometre of wind turbines and whose owners had suffered dire effects from those turbines. Clause 151 would have severely restricted the right to claim compensation against nuisance, leaving landowners, as the noble Baroness said, with no other route to take for compensation. It has also been argued that it would have allowed the operators of major infrastructure projects to claim immunity on the grounds of statutory authority against prosecution, even when it could be proved that they had been negligent. It seems therefore hardly to add to the chances of the IPC acquiring a degree of public acceptance if it is given so much protection from legal proceedings on grounds of nuisance brought by members of the public or by local authorities on their behalf that it becomes immune to the consequences of its decisions. The noble Baroness has decided to replace Clause 151 with the new clauses set out in Amendments Nos. 394A and 389B. These amendments were tabled only a matter of days ago and we need longer than we have had so far to examine their implications. Further, the noble Baroness with great courtesy and openness sent me in advance of this debate her speaking notes for this group, but again I have hardly been able to study them thoroughly. The purpose of the new amendments seems broadly to maintain the intention of Clause 151, which is to protect developers against claims for nuisance, except in the case of landowners, who will be given explicitly the right of compensation. That is the provision set out in Amendment No. 389B and I certainly welcome it. However, it would appear that no one except landowners will have a right to compensation or a claim for nuisance, so the rights that ordinary citizens who are not owner-occupiers but perhaps are tenants have today to bring proceedings on grounds of nuisance would be removed by the new clauses. I would like to consider very carefully what the noble Baroness has said and take a view in the days to come on whether to accept the new amendments.