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Planning Bill

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, but with a distinct lack of the legal expertise displayed by the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart. We are talking about regulations being put together to govern the application of a locally set, raised and applied levy. That levy is not a general tax, because it goes from a landowner or developer to pay both public and private agencies for infrastructure rendered. As the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, said, none of it goes to the Government. Parliament is not setting the levy. It is not even saying to what infrastructure it should contribute if it is levied at all. Parliament, which of course includes this House, merely wishes to apply its expertise to how this tax will work, as we should be doing now in the Bill and would be if Part 11 were not quite so anorexic—anorexic being one stage better than skeletal, as Part 11 was until quite recently. We have been floundering around, dealing with CIL, without really being able to get to grips with the detail of how it will work in practice—although, because of the expertise in this House, we have made significant progress. This is a planning Bill, and CIL is essentially to be a local charge on development permitted by planning permission. I hope that this House will continue to be able to apply its expertise to how the new regime will work. The Minister has mentioned several times during the passage of the Bill the fact that we have that expertise in this House. I hope that she will allow the planning system to avail itself, constructively and affirmatively, of that expertise.