My Lords, I was going to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Young, on her brilliant speech that meant that I did not have to say anything at all, really—until she started challenging me, as her
supporter on this amendment, in her last few remarks. I do not think I did capitulate on Clause 1; I think it was on Clause 5 that I came to the view that it was not going to make any difference to anybody in practice. I will review that, but I certainly still feel fairly resolute about Clause 1, which I think is fundamentally wrong in principle no matter how many councils it affects.
As far as shale gas is concerned, my view is there should be a limited-scale commercial pilot, which inevitably would be in the west Lancashire plain, before anything else happens. I think that will take quite a few years to get under way. I certainly would not be in favour of the large-scale development of shale gas in this country until that pilot had taken place and we could assess whether or not some of the worst fears are true. I suspect that some of the worst fears are not true but equally, we must assess the environmental and landscape implications, which are perhaps not quite as important as the more fundamental questions about the effects of the drilling, but are nevertheless very important. That is my view on shale gas. As I said in the previous group, I am in favour of as much of that decision-making as possible remaining at a local, Lancashire level, even though the basic consents for the actual operation would be taken at national level by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, and perhaps others.
I have one or two points to add to what the noble Baroness said. First, if there are 20 or 25 a year, the Government ought to come clean and tell us which commercial and business developments they believe have been stopped or significantly delayed in the past year or two years—or whatever period they choose—thus making this proposal necessary. Again, this would provide us with some hard evidence on the ground of ways in which the present system is preventing commercial and business developments taking place.
Of course, the Government would have to say which of those developments that have been delayed or, particularly, stopped they think ought to go ahead, and then people can judge this by outcomes. We can talk about processes until we are blue in the face but what most people are interested in are the actual outcomes of the planning process. Therefore, my question for the Government is: if this proposed new system had been in place for the past two years, what would have been different? If the answer is, “Not very much”, we are wasting our time here talking about it, quite frankly.
To underline what the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said about the underlying planning policies that will guide the Secretary of State in his decisions, the whole infrastructure planning process, as set out in the 2008 Act, originally through the Infrastructure Planning Commission, was based on a series of national policy statements, which were government policy and were originally intended to guide the Infrastructure Planning Commission in its decisions. Just as local plans are there to guide local planning authorities in their decisions, the national policy statements were there, in different policy areas, to guide the Infrastructure Planning Commission in its work.
Now that the infrastructure planning process is being undertaken by the Secretary of State, the system has a fundamental fault at the heart of it, and I am
increasingly of the view that the Government have got themselves into a bit of a mess by giving the powers of the Infrastructure Planning Commission to the Secretary of State. It is the Secretary of State who will make the policies and then make the development control decisions—presumably on the basis of the policies he has determined. There is something fundamentally wrong with that system, not least in that a decision is produced and there is no appeal process other than judicial review.
If there are not to be any of these national policy statements in relation to commercial and business development, where is the underlying planning policy coming from? Is it made up on the hoof by the Secretary of State or does it genuinely come from local plans? If it genuinely comes from local plans, why do we need to nationalise the system? As the noble Baroness eloquently explained, it is clearly not in the National Planning Policy Framework. The framework is very clearly set out as planning guidance from the Secretary of State, as policy, to local planning authorities making the decisions. That is its legal basis. That is what it is, and it replaces what the Government will say was about three feet of planning policy guidance that came in the old PPSs and PPGs. That has all gone; we have now got the National Planning Policy Framework. It is not an adequate basis for making decisions on big, nationally significant projects, whether they are on infrastructure or whether they are these new business and commercial ones that have been made by the Secretary of State.
The Government are in a bit of a mess over this. It is not clear on what basis the Secretary of State is going to make his decisions, which again is an invitation to more judicial review of decisions that are made.
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