This is an important series of amendments because they bear on the very issue that we have all raised with the Minister as to the difficulties which arise because of the procedure initiated by this clause. There is a real issue here, and it is one for her to consider deeply. I heard what she said about this not being contrary to the localism agenda; I cannot say that I was entirely convinced, but she obviously is concerned that it should be consonant with the localism agenda. Surely, the one important thing in the localism agenda is that the public locally feel themselves involved. The nature of the kinds of applications which are likely to be referred to the Minister rather than to the local authority is that they will be controversial and particularly controversial locally.
I say to the Minister that, in my experience of being a Member of Parliament for nearly 40 years, the one thing people will not put up with is not being able to be heard. I would commend to her my experience of the campaign about how we should build Sizewell B. This was very successful; we got every local parish council—50 or so—to support that planning permission. We did it because we went round to every single one of them and discussed it. We put the case for and against. We listened and made sure that none of the discussions were dominated by incoming protesters from either side and were just done by the locality, so that by the time they finished hardly anybody could say—nobody could say truthfully—that they had not been involved.
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Of course, in the light of that report to which my noble friend Lord Jenkin referred, one could say that that was another cost on the back of the production, but it was a very successful cost. It was not very expensive. A lot of volunteers, including me, worked on it, but it delivered a locally agreed attitude and a locally agreed solution. Sizewell B has been overwhelmingly supported throughout its operation by people locally because it started by people being able to put the issues that they were concerned about. I cite that example to the Minister because what came out of those discussions were that the things the public were concerned about, which were not the same things that the media said they were concerned about. It was not the nuclear issue but where the lorries would go, where people would park and what would happen to the buildings that would be used temporarily for workers on the site. All sorts of things like that came out.
I am concerned that if this process, about which I am unhappy anyway, is removed from the locality in a way that makes it something imposed by people outside, Swampy will not be the only one. This will have a reaction locally in the very way that the Government hope to avoid. It is incredibly important that there is a clear protocol that does not leave it to non-elected experts—the Planning Inspectorate—to decide whether it is satisfactory to have a small discussion, a big discussion or a written discussion. It should be quite
clear that the normal circumstance would be that at least as much discussion should take place with the locality as would happen had this been decided by the local council.
Secondly, I am very unhappy about being so uncertain about who should have this discussion. My experience is that you have to find the people who really will be affected, which is not necessarily done by applying to the preservation society, or the local residents’ association. We need to make sure that everybody who has a view and needs to put it forward can do so. Written submissions are all right for people in metropolitan places, but those of us who have worked for so long in rural areas know perfectly well that it is not a means of communication that people necessarily find easy and that they want opportunities to put their own views in their own way.
Thirdly, they do not want to have those opportunities restricted in the sense of there being some sort of spokesman who will put forward what they happen to think. They want to feel that there is an opportunity to have their say. My experience is of enabling people to have their say, which I always did as a Member of Parliament. I was not one of those who said he had nothing to do with planning applications. I had a lot to do with planning applications and I made sure that the local party knew what people thought. I did not tell it what to do but I made sure that it knew what people thought. I am very worried because I do not see that people will have their voice heard at all unless there is a much tougher statement from the Government that will be included in the supplementary legislation and the guidance to ensure that the inconvenient facts, which are that the public do not always welcome a particular development and do not always have the same problems with a development as the experts would want them to have, ought to be certainly faced. If this House does not face it I am not sure who will insist that people locally should feel part of the decision. I cannot guarantee to the Minister that people will agree with the decision, but I can guarantee that if they do not feel they have been part of that decision it will be difficult to carry it through and there will be more and more direct action by people who feel that they did not have a chance to do anything other than protest.