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Planning and Energy Bill

Normally, when the House speaks with a single voice there is reason for the nation to tremble. When right hon. and hon. Members refer to an interesting, wide-ranging and comprehensive debate, they usually mean precisely the opposite. However, the rare occasions when the House unites in the praise of an individual Member for promoting a Bill are so unusual that that praise is almost always utterly sincere. On this occasion, the sincerity evident in the tributes paid to the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) speaks for itself. The hon. Gentleman is to be congratulated on the way in which he has promoted the Bill. He has not used some of the more flashy and apocalyptic images. He has been more of a Barrington than a Dexter, more of a Gooch than a Gower and more of an Erik Nevland than a Diomansy Kamara. His taut, sparse, precise, elegant Bill has been all the better for that. This is the right Bill at the right time. It chimes well with the planning policy statement on climate change, and it comes at a time when there is not only increasing concern about the global consequences of warming and climate change but an unprecedented period of house building—we need only look at the new developments in the Thames Gateway. The Bill will put a strong lock that cannot be ignored on all developments in the future. The issue of cost has been mentioned, and everybody knows the principle of BATNEEC—best available technology not entailing extra costs. In this case, the costs are so huge that they are beyond the mere monetary, and people are beginning to accept the reality of that. Some of the new developments in the Thames Gateway, and some of the work that was done by Taylor Woodrow around what used to be called the millennium dome and is now called the O2 something or other, have used renewable sources, from the bricks to the structure to the entire energy package. That was emerging technology, and the Bill will give us a statutory—