My Lords, I should appear to be sympathetic to anything that seeks to push power back into the hands of local planning authorities as regards their ability to reject a planning application and the Secretary of State having to support the decision. But I am worried about anything that would compel that, on the basis that if developers were not able to appeal to the Government to revisit the decision, they would go through the courts, at which point a council would not only have to employ planning people to deal with a planning appeal, it would have to pay for a barrister as well. So while I am sympathetic to the fact that planning applications which have been refused for non-compliance should
not be routinely overturned, I would rather see the Government take a firmer hand with the Planning Inspectorate to ensure that when it does intervene in a case, it does so in a way that has been properly tested by the Secretary of State. I said on the last occasion that people in the outside world are saying that some planning inspectors have gone feral, and that position still pertains today. So rather than compelling the Secretary of State to support a refusal by a council, we need to encourage him to take a firmer grip of the Planning Inspectorate to make sure that in all cases it operates in the way the Government have sanctioned and not in a way that it chooses to sanction for itself.