It would certainly speed things along markedly.
The planning register is a sensible and useful device. May I float another suggestion with the Minister? The Welsh Assembly Government have put the historic environmental record on a statutory footing. It might be useful to do that here so that local heritage information is available. That would avoid the risk of something being thrown up that delays the process after a good deal of investment has taken place.
Finally, I endorse all the comments made by my good friend, my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), about compulsory purchase. He referred to the rates of interest. It is important that we deal swiftly with those matters. As I said to the Secretary of State, perhaps he would be prepared to meet some of us to yet again revisit the vexed issue of the inability of local planning authorities to impose planning conditions on their own land—land that they own as a landowner—that they would enforce as a local authority. Their inability to do that is bizarre. My London Borough of Bromley has ambitious schemes to drive business and business rates growth, but it is bizarre that it cannot, as an authority, put an obligation on its own land that it wishes to comply with in order to drive the rest of a scheme.
I hope that those are constructive suggestions that will make a good Bill even more useful.
8.31 pm