My Lords, I will start by putting all this in context for the House. We are addressing the need for national infrastructure. This is now widely accepted. It is not sufficient to talk about it and to produce lists of things that could be done. One has got to get ahead with it. Much of the Bill—and I welcome this—is clearly directed to that end; to try to remove some of the barriers, speed up the timetables, reduce the bureaucracy that has been involved, and in every way help those who are contemplating substantial infrastructure investment to achieve their objectives, of course while protecting important environmental and other interests. The CBI wrote in response to these questions that:
“Infrastructure investment is critical for boosting the economic performance of the UK and it is important that the right conditions are set to encourage the private sector to bring forward projects to boost growth. Infrastructure UK has identified a pipeline of
more than 550 projects requiring more than £330 billion of investment by 2015 and beyond, with over 85% of this coming from private sector sources. At the same time significant investment is needed in other forms of commercial and residential property to boost business productivity and ensure an adequate supply of housing”.
I quote those figures to demonstrate just how enormous is the task that faces this country in trying to catch up with what under successive Governments has been a neglect of infrastructure investment in keeping our essential infrastructure up to date.
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Perhaps I may follow the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, in saying a word about consents given by other bodies. This has become a major obstacle, and I have tabled other amendments to deal with this when it is a matter of local planning authorities. Here we are discussing the system that was set up by the Planning Act 2008, which was originally the Infrastructure Planning Commission and now is part of the Planning Inspectorate. Sir Michael Pitt and his colleagues deserve our very warm thanks for the readiness with which they switched the commission’s role from being an independent agency, with the power to make decisions, to becoming part of the inspectorate, with the decisions having to be made be Ministers. The democratic legitimacy of that was very obvious but they accepted it without question and are working extremely hard in developing that.
Turning to the consents that are required, to which the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, referred, guidance has been issued recently to those wanting development consent orders—DCOs—and a section on who should be consulted, titled “Statutory bodies and other relevant groups”, sets out a stronger onus on the consulting bodies to consider including consents in the DCO. Again, I quote:
“Where an applicant proposes to include non-planning consents within their Development Consent Order, the bodies that would normally be responsible for granting these consents should make every effort to facilitate this. They should only object to the inclusion of such non-planning consents with good reason, and after careful consideration of reasonable alternatives. It is therefore important that such bodies are consulted at an early stage”.
It sounds like common sense, but actually it has not been happening. The objective of a one-stop shop has proved extraordinarily difficult to achieve in reality. Some of the amendments in this group are intended to try to help this forward.
The noble Lord has referred to the payment of fees, and to national policy statements. I have one question for my noble friend: as the Government become keener on the development of shale gas, is it not now apparent that we are going to need a national policy statement for shale gas? A large number of different government departments are going to be involved if that industry is to move from the exploratory to the development phase, which is clearly envisaged by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his Autumn Statement.
Other national policy statements have been very successful; the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, mentioned some of them. On the whole, the national policy statement for nuclear is standing the test of time, but I share the anxiety about the sheer volume of paper that EDF had to submit for its development at Hinkley
Point. It is a large, powerful company with a lot of expertise but I heard that it had to submit 45,000 pages—there must be ways of dealing with that.
One way of dealing with that could be to improve the pre-application process. There is a strict timetable once the application has been lodged with the Planning Inspectorate. The target is that an applicant should get a decision within 12 months. But it is in the pre-application stage that applicants are expected to consult very widely with a range of interests. Of course, with a big project such as Hinkley Point, this is of enormous importance. From my knowledge of the case, it has been conducted extremely thoroughly by EDF and its contractor Arriva, but it can drag on and on. Amendment 75ZAA suggests that there should be some oversight of the pre-application stage. The Planning Inspectorate—which is always knows as PINS—should be involved in that, to help and advise both the applicant and the consulted bodies and individuals on the best way of doing this, and to set a reasonable timetable of how it might be achieved. So far this has not happened. There may be some informal contacts, but what is looked for here is a legislative imprimatur for such a process, to keep the pre-application stage under control. I hope the Government will be prepared to consider this.
We debated the question of the national planning statements at great length during the passing of the Planning Act 2008. I always hoped that there would be national planning statements for all the main categories of major investment. I have to say to my noble friends on the Front Bench that it is disappointing that this has not happened so far, but I will not repeat the statement of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley.
I can perhaps cover the other proposed new subsections more briefly. If we could achieve the pre-application programme management and oversight mentioned, there would be a shorter period and lower costs. Applications would not be over-egged or gold-plated, as I think happened with the Hinkley Point application and have been told also happened with others. It would improve the process of engagement by local authorities and other statutory consultees, and reduce the risk of applications having to be withdrawn or being long drawn out during subsequent stages. All this would help make the whole process more efficient.
Finally, there is the question of waivers. There should be a procedure whereby the Secretary of State may recognise that some of the processes or requirements are irrelevant to a particular application by an applicant, and can be waived. The applicant would then not have to go through the process of submitting documents and evidence for matters which are really quite irrelevant. It is perhaps strange that such a procedure does not exist already, but this amendment includes such a requirement. People have to put all sorts of things into application documents: a land plan, a works plan, an access plan, an ecological plan, a heritage plan and a Crown land plan, separately or in combination. However, the fact is that an application may already contain a full environmental statement covering all these matters; does this really have to be duplicated? It seems to me that in this case the system could again be improved. It has been a good system, and it has been widely admired and taken up. When I looked at the website over the
weekend there were 101 applications currently under consideration by PINS using the new procedure, and there will be many more. However, it needs to be improved and speeded up, and this is an opportunity for us to do that. I hope Ministers will respond positively to some of these issues.