My Lords, the letter in question was to the noble Baroness. If she is happy for it to be made available to the Committee, then, of course, I would be happy, too. I presume that my honourable friend at the other end was expecting at least most of it to be made public because it is a very public response to the questions asked. I do not think that there would be any disagreement with my saying that the local plan and the National Planning Policy Framework are both likely to be important and relevant in these matters. We have issued a consultation paper on extending the regime to business and commercial schemes, seeking views on whether one or more national policy statements should be prepared. These matters are relevant to today’s debate and the answers are the Government’s answers.
I do not think that moving business and commercial applications to the infrastructure regime will be a blow to local authorities. As I have said, we expect only a
small number of applications to come forward and for most of them to be dealt with by local authorities.
I was also asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, whether we had any evidence that change is necessary. Over the past four financial years, the proportion of large-scale major applications for commercial and industrial projects taking more than 52 weeks to be decided by local authorities has increased from 8% to 13%, which is quite a significant rise.
We are not proposing to make mandatory this route for developers—it is optional—and there will be a timetabled approach. Developers will have to decide for themselves whether to use the infrastructure regime.
As we set out in our recent consultation document on the new business and commercial category of development, the Government do not consider the case to be strong for one or more national policy statements for this category of development. The consultation closed in January and we are considering the responses to that, including on whether national policy statements should be prepared. I think that we will discuss those later during our consideration of the Bill.
I was asked whether there will be sufficient resources. We are discussing the resource implications with the Planning Inspectorate at the moment.
We also had a question on fracking, which has come up quite a bit through the course of the Bill. It is clearly a developing situation. The information that the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, gave us was interesting and begins to put a scale on what the ultimate development could be. At present, fracking applications will not be taken out of the hands of local authorities. Any developer will have to consult the local community and local people and the local authority will have the right of determination. A request would have to be made to the Secretary of State to use the infrastructure regime and he would agree to such a request only where the proposal raised issues of national significance. It may be that national significance and fracking will be one and the same but that gives an indication that at present we would expect this to be dealt with locally and local people would have a big say in what was to happen.
I think that covers the questions I was asked. The noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, also asked about fracking and, as I said, gave us very helpful figures from the report. I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Young, whether she would be happy for the letter from my honourable friend Nick Boles to be circulated. If so, I will make it available but if she does not wish that we will no doubt discuss the issues again at a later stage.