My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 75ZA and 75ZAA in this group. I shall not speak to Amendment 75, which probably should not be there because it has been superseded. As an introduction to these amendments, I will say that Amendments 72 and 75ZAA have the support of the British Property Federation, the Confederation of British Industry, the National Infrastructure Planning Association and the Royal Town Planning Institute—so noble Lords will see where I am coming from. I am grateful to the Minister for the meeting we had a week or two ago to discuss all these amendments. It was extremely helpful. I hope that we have made progress and will continue to do so.
All the amendments that I am speaking to are attempts to learn from the experience of the Planning Act 2008 and to take account of how the process has changed with the introduction of the changes
made by this Government. I hope that many of the suggestions will be useful in trying to streamline and simplify the regime in order to reduce the delay, cost, uncertainty and risk in delivering some of these big projects. After all these years, and having tried hard to simplify things—both Governments of the past 10 years have tried to do that—there is still a long way to go. Steven Norris, the chairman of the National Infrastructure Planning Association, recently wrote in the Times:
“A modern economy needs a planning system that doesn’t smother democracy, but makes reasoned decisions in a reasonable timescale”.
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He then quotes the painful lessons of HS2, which we have talked about many times in this House. There is still some way to go on this. At the other end of the spectrum it is interesting that Sir Michael Pitt has gone public on what he calls the intimidating amount of paper that applicants are sending to the Infrastructure Planning Commission. New Civil Engineer of 31 January this year says that EDF, the new nuclear company about which we were talking in Question Time, submitted a 36,000-page environmental impact assessment as part of its planning application. IPC people are human like everybody else. Sir Michael is right; it is ridiculous to expect anybody to look at things that long.
Some of the amendments to which I will be speaking this afternoon suggest ways of simplifying and speeding things up. The last amendment in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, is very long because it all goes in one place, so we have agreed that we will split up the initial introduction, so that noble Lords do not hear either of us for too long. I hope that the Committee will find that helpful but of course we can intervene later if we want to.
Amendment 72 refers to the fact the Planning Act regime was supposed to give a one-stop shop for major projects. The problem is that there is still a large number of prescribed consents that may be disapplied only by a development consent order with the permission of the body that would otherwise be responsible for granting that consent. If that body’s permission cannot be obtained, one has to go for separate consents, which add to the time and cost of the application.
Sir Michael Pitt, who is chief executive of the Planning Inspectorate, said only two weeks ago at a conference that 40% of the required consents were outside the DCO regime. This is a very high percentage, as I think that the Committee will agree. This amendment removes the requirement in Section 150 to obtain a consenting body’s permission and replace it with an obligation to consult that body in any case where the promoter intends to include in the draft DCO a provision disapplying a consent for which that body is responsible. This would mean a case-by-case approach, and if the consenting body had concerns about the disapplication, it could object. This would be an interesting and useful way of simplifying the process for those bodies that are happy to do it. I hope that that is a sufficient introduction to this amendment.
Amendment 75ZA is not supported by the organisations that I mentioned earlier. This is not because they oppose it; they have not been asked to support it.
I thought it might be useful to raise this issue, and it comes in this group. It comes out of a discussion that a number of colleagues have recently had about the increase in heavy goods vehicle movements to major construction sites. In so far as this affects rail, I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group. It also affects water. If you look big projects that have been built and that are being planned at the moment, some have done extremely well in reducing the amount of road traffic to and from the sites, and some have done pretty badly. The construction of terminal 5 was probably the best in terms of non-road movements; it had several consolidation centres away from the site and brought everything in by rail. The Olympics at Stratford were not bad: a lot of material went by rail and some of it went by water. The Thames tideway tunnel, which your Lordships have debated at some length and no doubt will debate again, started off by driving away by road all the spoil from the excavation of that enormous tunnel wherever the sites on the Thames were. That was about 500 trucks a day. When I suggested that it should be sent by water, I was told that the river was too congested. However, if you look outside today, you are lucky to see a ship going past every few minutes. There is more to it, sadly, because with some of the big developments that are now taking place, usually on the south bank of the Thames, a lot of work could be done to take the spoil away by river, with short road or conveyor-belt journeys if necessary.
Looking at a different project, and back on nuclear I am afraid, Sizewell is one of those which look likely to go ahead with EDF. The latest rough calculation of the number of trucks required to go in and out of that site every day is about 300. As some noble Lords will know, the roads around Sizewell are not very good for that number. In addition, if the promoter, EDF, was able instead to send more of the goods by water, sea and rail, it could also bring some of the workers in by rail by improving the railway lines. There are benefits there as well. The suggestion is to require those who are applying to those granting development consent to include in their applications a report on the feasibility of using water and rail transport. It may not always be possible, but it will at least make people think about it. I shall be interested to hear what the Minister has to say in his reply when we get there.
I will speak to the first few provisions of the last amendment in this group, Amendment 75ZAA. The new subsection (2) proposed in the amendment would insert new subsections into Section 4 of the Planning Act 2008 on fees. There is a bit of a problem over how the infrastructure planning commission calculates its fees. It is worrying for those who are making an application because if they do not pay the fees, they will not make any progress with their applications. You either pay it if you want this, or you do not pay it. The real problem here is that the fees are set out in the Infrastructure Planning (Fees) Regulations 2010, which provide that PINS may charge for each day in which the examining authority examines the application,
“in the period beginning with the start day … and ending with the completion of the examination”.
The problem is whether it charges five days a week from when it starts to when it finishes or charges only for
the actual days worked by the examining authority, not by all the staff underneath, but just the examining authority. It makes quite a lot of difference to the fees. I do not know what the solution is, but there have been examples when one examining authority has been known to be examining two applications at the same time. If you are charging for what you are doing on a daily rate, that does not seem quite right. We have had discussions with the noble Baroness, and I know that this is something that the Government are looking at. However, it needs some pretty detailed investigation so that applicants know what they are going to be up to and have some confidence that the examining authority has been able to demonstrate that the money that has been spent, and the hours and days worked, are on their project.
The last part of the amendment concerns national policy statements. I am afraid that the amendment responds to the Department for Transport’s failure to bring forward the National Networks NPS, which is supposed to cover railways, the strategic road network and strategic rail freight interchanges. I am not going to go into why these are necessary. Given that the cost of applications for these facilities can go into tens of millions of pounds or more, the more comfort that these companies can have—especially when they are private sector companies—the better.
The NPS was first promised to be published for consultation in October 2009. That is over three years ago. It has been repeatedly delayed and it is not thought to be coming any time soon. In fact, at some stage applicants have been told that they may never see it. At a recent Enterprise Forum event, the Secretary of State for Transport said that an NPS covering roads and rail is “far from imminent”. I am not sure how many years “far from imminent” is in government-speak, but it is years not months, as the Department for Transport prefers to concentrate on specific projects. I find this depressing and discouraging. If the department is going to go back to its old ways of 10 or 20 years ago of keeping roads in one box and railways in another and then saying, “Oh dear, they don’t meet in the middle”, it is a step backwards. I hope when he responds the Minister can give us some comfort that I have got it all wrong and it is actually going to happen very quickly so we can all be excited and welcome it. I will leave the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, to carry on. I beg to move.