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Planning Bill

My Lords, I thank the Government for looking at and acting on this. As the noble Lord will know, it turns out that there has been an unintended consequence. I should perhaps apologise to all other fire and rescue authorities because the legislation that this seeks to amend seems to allow the overriding of covenants on land, which was what lay behind this. Given LFEPA’s PFI programme, it now seems that not only will LFEPA not have these powers, because the section in question deals with local authorities, not local planning authorities—I might have that the wrong way round—but that no other fire and rescue services will have them either. I am informed in a message I received after proceedings started this afternoon that the Government do not consider corrective legislation appropriate at this time. I can understand that it is very difficult for the Government to be faced with this matter at this stage. However, I make a plea for it to be considered as quickly as possible and for some mechanism to be found to correct this problem. They have responded very quickly to the issue, but at that time nobody thought that it would throw up a different problem. I hope that something can quickly be tacked on to other legislation because clearly it is nonsensical not to sort this out and to enable all fire and rescue authorities to deal with covenants appropriately by placing them on the same footing as other local authorities. On Question, amendment agreed to.