My Lords, I will briefly intervene—it will be brief because I am enormously grateful for the very full answer given by my noble friend. I am grateful for what he said about clarifying “public consultation” and I agree with a number of things he said.
This point was made by others on the first day in Committee, and I will not go over it again, but this is a Neighbourhood Planning Bill. It is about getting things built, but built with consent, which is the trick one has to take. My concern is if a developer says, “I am not agreeing to any conditions of that sort—you can us refuse permission and we will see you in Bristol”. That is not empowering local people in any way. As my noble friend Lady Hodgson said, the risk is that that will happen, because if the developer decides that it does not want to agree, it is almost fast-tracked to the inspector whatever the local authority does, and that is not necessarily building consent into the system.
Perhaps the Government can wrestle with this point over the next few weeks. There really does not have to be any form of incentive in the law for responsible
developers not to co-operate. For example, many local authorities have to deal with developers which have not discharged previous planning conditions—they have just ignored them and nothing is done. Someone comes along and says, “I am going to build here”. You see these people and say, “You have not discharged your previous conditions, so let us write something in here to make sure that you are okay this time”. They then say, “We are not agreeing, we are not signing on there”, so it goes through, but does the inspector always take account? I beg my noble friend, as he considers these things further, not to rig the system too far.
The second cautionary thing I would say, having listened very carefully to what my noble friend said about the phrase “acceptable in planning terms”—which does trouble me—is that I understand from my noble friend that the Government cannot rock along and say, “We’ll have a 24-hour casino on that site, thank you very much”, and that it is about restricting the proposed ambit of the planning. This seems eminently justiciable because it does not refer to the national framework at all, as my noble friend pointed out. So if a little local campaign group is armed with a neighbourhood plan or the local development plan, and the Government come in and say, “We are putting forward this regulation to make it acceptable in planning terms and, by the way, by that we mean the NPPF”, the Little Ditchcombe Action Group might say, “It is not acceptable in planning terms, or in accordance with what we have in the neighbourhood plan that we have agreed, or what has been put in the local development plan”, and you could find yourself in the courts—I do not mean my noble friend in particular.
We need to be very careful about how this phrase is defined—many a lawyer and many a judge would have a high old time and earn a few bob in deciding what that phrase means. It is only the second cautionary thing I would say and I very much welcome the spirit and terms of the clause. I accept the way in which my noble friend said that the Government were coming at it, but they need to be careful. There should not be too many more eggs in the developer’s basket and there should be as much definition as possible—please—before Report. With that, I will stop detaining the Committee.