My Lords, as the Minister said, this order is simply to bring GDFs within the nationally significant infrastructure project regime of the Planning Act 2008. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has had to find out the hard way that that Act, brought in by Labour in 2008, has such an anti-democratic flavour, which at the time we feared it would. As he said, the order will remove from local planning authorities and their respective communities the final say in the planning process. I find that extraordinary when we are looking at something that we have never had before. It is not like a road, which can be a nationally significant infrastructure project if the Government choose to designate it as such; we have lots of roads. A railway, such as HS2, might be one. We have not had GDFs before; this is new. That is another reason why it should be subject to the proper rigours of a democratic planning process.
Perhaps one of the best things that the Labour Party did in the previous Government, during the time when it brought in the Planning Act, was in February 2005 when the UK ratified the UNECE Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, which became known as the Aarhus convention. That is the main thing I want to ask the Minister about today.
I am very pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, in his place. Back in 2006, I asked him whether any of the provisions in the Aarhus convention had yet to be implemented in the United Kingdom. He confirmed that we had ratified it and that the full lists of what that meant were now available. Those set out the UK’s range of obligations on access to information and public participation. I think that this GDF proposal would fall within Annex I to the Aarhus convention. It would be most helpful if the Minister could make some reference to that in her reply.
Having looked at the Government’s response, which was handed out with these papers today, it is very hard to balance the Government’s statement that they will not proceed without a positive test of public support without thinking that the ultimate test of public support for a planning issue is exactly that the local authorities involved make planning decisions. That is why the system was invented in the way that it was: so that there could be democratic representation and people could have a say. Something as important as this is not only about burying waste in the ground. Bear in mind that it is also about the transport of waste to that facility, which will have an enormous impact.
For all those reasons, I should like the Minister to assure us, for a start, that it complies with the Aarhus convention and, secondly, to consider whether the exceptional nature of GDFs should make them inapplicable to the process envisaged by the 2008 Act.