My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his response to these regulations which, if I interpret it correctly, is: “We don’t like them but see what you’re trying to do”. I take that to be the spirit in which the noble Lord delivered his response. He asked me a couple of questions, some of which I may be able to answer directly and some of which I may not.
The first was about the increase in planning fees. As I said in my opening remarks, they were increased by 15% across the board in November 2012, so local authorities have had quite an uplift in those fees very recently.
The next question was: what volume of applications do we expect to go to the directorate? We discussed this during the Growth and Infrastructure Bill proceedings.
We will know more about that when we see how many local authorities are to be designated in September. Once we see the data about which local authorities and how many are likely to be designated, it will be easier to judge that. As I said before, however, we do not expect this to be a huge number. In fact, we very much hope that there will not be a huge number, because that would mean that we were having to designate more local authorities than we wanted.
On the pre-application fee, if the developer is going to go to the inspectorate, it is very unlikely that they will want the local authority to, or indeed that the local authority would, hold any pre-application discussions. The intention is that the planning inspectorate will do any pre-application discussions and then charge a commensurate fee for them. In fact, perhaps I should rephrase that: the applicant can decide where to go, but we expect that they will probably go to the inspector if they are going to go there in the first place.
The noble Lord also asked me when information will be available about which authorities risk a designation. I think that I have answered that: September. The list will be published so they will know then. Indeed, many of them know now what the situation is because they are kept pretty well up to date with what is being put forward.
The noble Lord asked me about the £80 fee. I am now struggling a bit because I cannot remember what that was for. Would the noble Lord mind rephrasing his question?