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Planning Bill

My Lords, I support this amendment and indeed tabled a similar one in Committee. As other noble Lords have said, it provides a way of linking in legislative terms the big projects with all those that fall below it and generally come under the term of projects that people do not want in their back yards. They include not only the wind farms that so many noble Lords have talked about, but also rail freight terminals—I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group—waste sites, hazardous waste disposal and ports. We have all come across examples of where people do not want developments in their back yards. I am not sure that you can have a mini nuclear reactor, but perhaps someone will come up with one of those. The fact remains, as my noble and learned friend Lord Boyd has said so clearly, that we need a legislative link to ensure that policies at the top of big projects can cascade down and take precedence over the regional and local policies beneath them.