My Lords, I am pleased to speak on this group, and I will speak also to my Amendment 181 to Clause 83. I sat through Second Reading but did not speak. I can claim only that I had intellectual indigestion through trying to understand what the Bill is all about.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, is looking at the difficulties from a local authority point of view. My speech is from a devolved authority point of view. It is in Part 3 of the Bill that the devolved Administrations have the greatest worries about infringement of their devolved competence. My interest is as a Scot living in Scotland. Part 3 of the Bill has been referred by the Scottish Parliament to its Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee for consideration, and other sections have been referred to the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee and the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee. That is all very well, but none of these committees has recommended legislative consent, and they are due to give their final conclusions when we get to Third Reading, which is not very far off.
At an earlier stage in the Bill, my noble friend the Minister was telling the House that civil servants are regularly in touch with their Scottish counterparts. Surely a Bill of this complexity must, at some stage, require some negotiation at ministerial level as well. Can my noble friend tell us of any hint of consent from any of these branches of the Scottish Parliament?
I turn to Clause 81 and the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman. The clause requires the use of approved planning data in England. It portends that one of the things that the Government will be seeking is to get compliance in due course with the use of their approved planning data from all the devolved Administrations. While this may be understandable on a practical level, it bears the echo of a previous experience that the Scots have had, in a more limited field with which I am familiar. Some years ago, in contrast to England, the Scots developed an electronic sheep traceability system and associated database, known as sheep EID. It has worked very well. Recently, the department in England decided to inaugurate a similar programme and was offered the chance to share the system and the cost. This was rejected for no apparent reason. Therefore, one has misgivings about the application of systems.
At various points in the Bill we have considered whether the requirement for consultation is appropriate. There is much that can be said about meaningful consultation, but this clause requires any Secretary of State to consult in specific circumstances. The amendment requires them to publish the results and give reasons. The issue is of much concern to the Scottish Law Society, which drew my attention to it and which welcomes the obligation to consult and to give the conclusions and reasons for the decision, which would serve the interests of transparency.
In a previous group, we had a magnificent example of people dying to know the outcome of a consultation when the Government were sitting on it. This amendment would ensure that all information was available. It seems obvious that planning was not reserved under Schedule 5 to the Scotland Act 1998 and so it is fair to assume that planning data falls into the same category. Can we assume that as the approved planning data systems for England required by the Bill are developed, we will be aware of what is likely to be required from the existing records of the devolved Administrations?