My Lords, at the heart of this matter is a fundamental difference of view, which I shall turn to in a minute. I thank the Minister for replying in great detail to the amendments, most of which I did not speak to specifically. I discarded my notes on those because I thought I had spoken for long enough. I had listened to myself for long enough even if other people had not. I am very grateful to her for doing that, because it gives me something to go away and read carefully. Many of them were probing amendments to find out what the Government really meant by them. I am grateful for the offer from the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, to have further discussions on this. I hope that we might have further discussions all round.
There may be agreement between the two Front Benches, but there is a wish, certainly on the part of the Minister and I thought there might be on the part of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, to bring the registration of greens, as part of the process of deciding the future of land, into the planning process. The Minister has said that quite clearly on several occasions. She talked about the decisions on the future of land not being bypassed by the registration process and so on.
My submission is that there are two separate systems and that the registration of greens is not part of the planning process because, as clearly set out in the commons legislation, it is a question of the establishment of fact and not a question of what, as a matter of opinion or a matter of planning policy, ought to happen. That is the difference. There are two quite separate processes based on different principles and different legislation. One goes back to commons law, as set out in commons legislation, and the other is the planning legislation which is relatively recent, dating mainly from 1948.
There is a difference of view here. It seems to me that the Government are saying that the planning process, or the ability of communities collectively to make a decision about pieces of land, should always trump the commons registration and greens registration process. I think that they should come out openly and honestly and say so and then we can have that argument. They ought not to be pushing it through as one element of a rag-bag miscellaneous Bill of bits and pieces gathered from all sorts of places. At the moment, we have a problem with a meeting of minds because we come from quite separate areas. Perhaps that can be thought about and talked about further.
Of course, there are practical dangers in what is being proposed. It will be two months after the passing of this legislation—assuming it is passed—that it will commence. During those two months people might start rushing in with registration applications. I do not know whether they will, but they might if they know what is going on.
I have one question for the Minister. I am not sure that I know the answer to it. What happens if a piece of land is subject to a registration for a village green—if an application goes in—and somebody makes a planning application after that? Is making a planning application after an application has been made to register a green a way of trumping it completely? That would run a coach and horses through the entire system set out in Section 15 of the Commons Act. I should like that question answered.
I agreed with a lot of what the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, said about the planning system. The purpose of the system is to balance different interests and make a decision. I do not disagree with any of that, and I agree that many of the people who come forward on planning applications have special interests—in particular the people who go out hunting for natterjack toads, great crested newts, various sorts of obscure bats and types of birds of which I have never heard. That always happens. A sensible planning system deals with all that. With respect to the noble Lord, it seemed that what he said was not relevant to this discussion because the green registration system is not part of the planning system. If he and other noble Lords say that it should be and want to change the system, that is a different argument. There would be some big arguments all over the place about that.