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Planning Bill

I have great sympathy with what the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said. It raises the crucial question of how the whole structure will work. Where the NPS is location-specific, we know exactly what will happen. Where it is not, I ask how we will get away from the problem that has bedevilled planning inquiries: the necessity to solve the whole national problem within the inquiry before one can determine what its results should be. Let us suppose that we had a national policy statement that said that we should derive 5 per cent of our energy from wind. Let us suppose that it went a bit further and said that that would imply 5,000 turbines that, allowing for other things, ought to occupy half of the 10,000 best sites in the UK. If the IPC is faced with an application to put 24 turbines on a hill somewhere, how on earth is it to know whether this is one of the 10,000 best sites in the UK? How is it to know how that division is made between the best sites that get turbines and the best sites that do not? Unless we have solved those problems in putting the national policy statement together, we will leave the IPC in exactly the same position as we leave inspectors now and the difficulties and delays will remain. We have to sort out, in considering this Bill, how national policy statements will absorb all the politics, without leaving large chunks around to obstruct the process of the IPC later.