My Lords, I hesitate to intervene. I am not an expert on planning and I have never served on a local planning authority, but I have been involved from the other side, the side
of the applicant—not big developments but small developments in villages and so on—so I probably see this slightly differently.
I am on my feet because I cannot quite see why all the conditions and the problems that have been mentioned by noble Lords—drainage, lighting and so on—cannot be dealt with, as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, suggested, in the pre-decision planning conditions. In other words, in the normal planning agreement, you work with the planning authority to determine under exactly what conditions the planning permission will be granted, but surely Clause 12 is not about planning conditions; it is about a situation when all the conditions have to be implemented before the building starts. That is where the delay seems to be, and the clause seems to me quite reasonable.
I realise that the problem is probably the financing of planning departments, which do not have the resources to deal with all the issues prior to giving or not giving planning permission. To some extent, pre-commencement conditions are added after the council has decided on an application because there may not have been the resources to deal properly with the application before that point. The local planning authority also may not have the resources to check during the building of the development that all the conditions that had originally been agreed to are being met. In other words, the only way in which this can be done simply is to do it pre-commencement, so that applicants have to apply before they can start building. It is a cheap route out of a particular problem.
I am not an expert on planning, as I said, but it seems to me that there is a difference between ordinary planning conditions and pre-commencement planning conditions. As someone who has applied, I know that sometimes pre-commencement planning conditions delay the scheme and can be, as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, described, an ambush—suddenly new conditions are added after the planning conditions and all the terms have been agreed to. However, I am not sure why all noble Lords’ concerns are so targeted against the pre-commencement conditions.