My Lords, I did not quite catch what the Minister said. Will a published summary of the issues encompass a summary of the Government’s
views and their response to the consultation, and did she say we would perhaps have that before Report? Some of us did not put down detailed amendments on Clause 24 because we were waiting for some clearer indication of exactly what it means in detail. If we do not get at least a summary or broad overview of the Government’s views on this before Report, we might be tempted to take up more time on Report by putting new amendments down than the Minister would perhaps prefer.
The other questions I wanted to ask were about minerals. Will Clause 24 make a difference, for example, to the way in which planning permission or development consent is given for things such as quarries in national parks—the quarrying of limestone in the Peak District, for example—which are highly controversial and at the moment are done by the local planning authority, the national park? Are decisions like that going to be moved to the Secretary of State and the infrastructure planning regime?
The other question was specifically about the development of fracking for unconventional gas, which is going ahead slowly in Lancashire. Lots of different consents have to be obtained for that, notably from the Department of Energy and Climate Change, which takes place at a national level. However, the development that has taken place so far and the scale of it means that the planning permission, as I understand it, is the responsibility of the county council; in the case of the fracking that is taking place, or is about to resume, at the moment on an experimental basis in Lancashire, that will be Lancashire County Council.
It seems to me that with something like fracking, there are two crucial sets of decisions to be made. One is the question of whether the drilling, the fracking and the extraction of the gas should be allowed to take place. Then there are all the environmental issues related to that on the surface, such as the screening of developments and whether pipes from the different wellheads, which are quite close to each other, should be underground, overground or whatever, which is a matter of the local landscape and local planning. I would be quite appalled if the decisions over that kind of local planning were taken away from the local planning authority—in this case Lancashire County Council, as it is a minerals development—and put in the hands of a national authority, which I really do not think would have the local understanding or the ability to do the job properly. There are two separate issues there. Would it be possible for them to be separated, because they are dealing with quite different aspects, and for the decisions about whether the drilling and fracking goes ahead—and I should say that it seems to me that this is development which ought, at least on a pilot basis, to proceed as far as a viable commercial scheme—to be taken nationally through the infrastructure planning process but for the local details of the environmental protection and amelioration connected with it, and how that works on the surface, to be left with the local planning authority?