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Planning Bill

My Lords, that is precisely the point; I do not know. That is the problem. My own amendment is directed at trying to find out what is and is not included. My own preference would be for a clear statement in the Bill that infrastructure that is quite clearly infrastructure, whether it be a building or anything else, should not pay CIL. At the moment we have the ultimate irony that a building such as a hospital reception centre, which might be produced and funded entirely by CIL funds because of increased local demand as a result of population increase, having been funded by CIL nevertheless has to pay CIL. What are we thinking about? At the other end of the scheme, we need to remember that all this infrastructure is there to serve the community. Of course, much of it provides a service for which the community pays directly; you have only to think of power generation, but the same applies to the railway service, subsidised though it may be. In the end the customer pays, whether it be through the price of his ticket or through his taxes. To the extent that we charge CIL on any of this infrastructure, we are simply churning funds, and we should not be in the business of doing so. If we are providing infrastructure for which the customer pays, and he pays in one way or another for all of it, it should not actually be liable to pay an additional charge of this nature. That is a fairly simple statement of principle that is seriously lacking in the Bill, and which seems to be lacking in the Government’s thinking. This is another weakness of this part of the Bill. It has not been thought through. That is the reason for my amendment: it is partly to test the limits of the Government’s thinking, if it has any limits—or indeed whether they have thought at all—but it is also to enable me to define the principle on which we ought to be working. If we do not accept that principle, we are in the business of churning the taxpayer’s funds, which means we are churning our own funds. That is not a sensible thing to do.