My Lords, this is the first day of Committee and a new stage; according to the rules, I therefore need to repeat the declarations of interests that I made at Second Reading. I remind the House of my membership of a local planning authority and of two development management committees. I am also a vice-president of the LGA.
I have tabled Amendment 32, to which my noble friend Lord Tope was good enough to put his name, whereby if the Government wish to designate an authority they should set out a notice of intention to do so. There is agreement across the amendments in the group that this is a good idea. I have tried to flesh out the broad principle set out in the lead amendment and some others. My amendment states:
“Before designating an authority under this section, the Secretary of State must serve a notice of intention to designate … The notice must … specify the reasons for serving the notice, all of which must have regard to the criteria that the Secretary of State has published”.
It should,
“specify those actions by the authority which the Secretary of State believes are necessary to satisfy the reasons for serving the notice; and … give the authority a period of twelve months in which to take the specified actions”.
Whether the period should be 12 months is debatable but I took the view that the Government would not want it to be too long. The amendment continues:
“At the end of the twelve month period, the Secretary of State must publish a report which sets out the extent to which the reasons for serving the notice still apply or no longer apply”.
At that stage, the Secretary of State may confirm the designation and take over relevant planning applications or withdraw the designation because, in his opinion, the authority has pulled its socks up, or he may give the authority another six months in which to do so.
It seems to me that this whole process, for the first time, takes away planning powers from local planning authorities and vests them in the person of the Secretary of State on the basis of alleged or perceived poor performance by a local planning authority. This is quite new and the process needs to be absolutely transparent. People need to understand why the decision is being made and how the situation can be remedied.
Like other noble Lords, I would much prefer this provision to be taken out of the Bill. However, if it is going to be there, there needs to be a clear choice between a degree of perhaps heavy-handed, detailed intervention in the running of an authority to sort out the problem and the draconian and complex process of an almost immediate central takeover of some of the development management functions of that authority. Surely the first of those must be the way forward. However few of these authorities there may be, the Government are proposing to nationalise some of their planning functions. It is interesting that a Government with a majority of Conservatives are sometimes so interested in nationalising things which up until now have taken place at a local level.
The amendment puts forward a gentle nutcracker, not a sledgehammer, if there is a nut to be cracked, and I hope that something along these lines will find favour with the Government. In particular, even if they do not want to put something on the face of the Bill, I hope that they will give very clear commitments along the lines of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, so as at least to give authorities the right to defend themselves and to explain what they can do, and also to give them a period of time in which to improve their performance so that we do not have to go through this rather draconian and undesirable rigmarole of the Planning Inspectorate—bless them—taking over detailed local planning functions.