Planning Bill

A number of other amendments are grouped with this amendment. I do not know whether other noble Lords wish to speak to them. I shall simply refer to Clause 190. The Minister has written me a long and extremely helpful letter about the appeal procedure and the appellant choosing the procedure for handling their case. Much of what she said is persuasive, so I do not wish to pursue it, although other noble Lords may wish to do so. Amendment No. 433A is about fees. I entirely understand the principle of paying a fee for making an appeal to cover part of the cost of the Planning Inspectorate handling the appeal. However, I cannot support charging an appellant when the reason for the appeal is the failure of the local authority to decide the application. That is double jeopardy. In all too many cases, non-determination is a positive decision by the local authority. It enables the authority to evade the local political difficulty of making an unpopular decision and shifts the burden on to the inspectorate. In the present environment of control over local authorities—we are still living very much in a target culture—many local planning authorities resort to avoiding making decisions on more complicated applications so as to ensure that they are able to meet the target for processing applications within eight weeks of receipt. That is, as it were, working to the target. In those circumstances, it would be very unfair to levy fees on the appellant because in the end he was driven to appeal. Perhaps the noble Baroness is able to argue why that is right. I would argue that it is quite wrong in those circumstances. The local authority should bear the costs.