I am sorry to keep pursuing this point but it is really very important indeed. Any of us who has worked on this Bill knows
the difficulty of how many crossovers there are with other Bills. On the previous group of amendments, from my perspective and I am sure from those of colleagues on these Benches, we ended up referencing back through various Bills to get to the point that the amendments referred to. That does not make life easy, and I am sure it makes it very opaque for professionals and the public trying to deal with the system. That simply underlines yet again, as we have done many times through this process, that a planning Bill might have been a better option to get to the rationalisation of the planning system, but we are where we are with that.
We remain concerned about just how this exercise will be done. Will a whole series of statutory instruments come through? Will it just be for the Secretary of State to make the decisions and then change the legislation—I am not entirely sure how that works in process terms—or will we have a whole other Bill that will be the “consolidation of planning Bill 2025” or something? I am interested as to what the process will be for this, because we have 25 Acts here at least—there are probably more than that, in truth—that need amending.