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Energy: National Policy Statements

My Lords, at the outset I ask for guidance from the Minister on a matter of procedure. The Secretary of State has provided for parliamentary scrutiny of the NPSs to last until 6 May. But what happens if the calling of the general election results in this Parliament ending without this series of debates being completed? Will statements that have not been debated then not be designated? Will none of them be designated? Moreover, as we have heard, the Planning Act provides that either House may make a resolution with regard to any NPS and that a committee of either House may make recommendations, and that in the event of that happening the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a Statement setting out his response to such a resolution or to such recommendations. Those are provisions in the Act. As we have heard, the Leader of the House has given an assurance that time would be allowed in this House to debate any resolutions that might be tabled after our debates have been completed. Plainly, there must be time for all that to occur. I should be grateful if the Minister would confirm that the Government intend that the provisions in the Act relating to parliamentary scrutiny will be fully observed and that, if that does not happen before the end of the Parliament, the Secretary of State will set a revised date, later than 6 May, for designating the NPSs. I would like to raise another point relating to procedure. Anxiety was caused in some circles by a letter sent out from the DCLG to chief planning officers, dated 9 November 2009, which called on LPAs and other decision-makers to take account of policies set out in NPSs when determining applications that fell below the thresholds set out in the Act. That letter went on to say that the policies in a draft NPS may also be relevant to planning applications for below-threshold infrastructure or any appeals made under the Town and Country Planning Act. Such an instruction was surely improper in view of the fact that NPSs in draft form, such as they still are, are merely proposals before Parliament and are without legal force. Several Members of Parliament and others took up these matters with the Minister at the time. I have seen copies of some of the letters written by the Minister in reply. His letters were reasonably reassuring regarding the Government’s intent. The Minister stated that it was not intended that NPSs should be treated any differently by local planning authorities or by inspectors deciding appeals from any other statement of government policy, nor was it intended to instruct local planning authorities or inspectors deciding appeals to take decisions in any different way from that in which they have been doing. I should be grateful if the Minister could reassure us that the Government stand by those words because the letter to the chief planning officers may, so far, have had a wider circulation than the Minister's clarification. This is a matter of some importance, because we have begun to see the NPSs being prayed in aid when planning applications or planning appeals are heard. My chief concern about the content of EN-1 is that not enough emphasis is given to the obligation on the IPC to consider local objections. There is very scant reference indeed to any of the obligations to consult that are imposed on the applicant for development permission and on the IPC by the 2008 Act. There is no reference at all to the pre-application consultation procedure which the applicant must undertake and which the IPC must be satisfied he has undertaken. There is indeed a reference in paragraph 1.1.1 to the need for the IPC to have regard to any local impact report that is submitted, but these are to be submitted by local authorities, and what happens, as the CPRE wondered, when the local authority is so in favour of a development proposal that it does not wish to give proper representation to any adverse implications? There is no reference in EN-1 to the three forms of hearing, which the Act deals with at length, or to written representations, which take up virtually all of Part 4 of the Act. There are two references to representations from or consultations with the local community: one is to the IPC’s decision-making with regard to the impact on existing land use; the other is to consideration of the impact on heritage assets. There is no such mention of consultation in all the other incidences that are cited. There is no mention, for example, of the IPC consulting local interests in the sections on noise and on the landscape and visual impacts—a point which the noble Lord, Lord Judd, made. What are we to make of that? Is mention of the need for consultation or not purely arbitrary under each impact heading, or is there a process of deliberate prioritising at work, suggesting that in some areas it is more important to consult than in others? Whether or not that is the intention, it could be the message that was received. In any event, the need for the IPC to consult third parties is played down in the NPSs, which is unsatisfactory. As the CPRE said in its memorandum to the Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change in another place—the noble Lord, Lord Chorley, mentioned this: ""The guidance in the draft NPSs on how the IPC should consider local impacts is totally insufficient. Getting the right balance between national need and local adverse impacts will be one of the IPC’s biggest challenges. At present, it is difficult to imagine how negative local impacts could ever outweigh national"." I endorse what the CPRE says. Having said all that, however, I must acknowledge that the guidance notes that were issued earlier this month for the benefit of the IPC to assist it in its examination of development consents give another impression. They certainly do not indicate any wish to stifle local opinion. They spell out in meticulous, even exhaustive, detail the ways in which the Planning Act requires the IPC to conduct hearings and to give additional advice, even instructions, within the spirit of the legislation, on how the IPC should carry out these duties. I welcome them warmly. Like the noble Lord, Lord Judd, however, I am also concerned that the NPS may weaken the protection for nationally designated landscapes such as national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty. This was also a matter of concern for the CPRE. Paragraph 4.24.7 in EN-1 states that the IPC may exceptionally grant consent to development in these areas if the development is demonstrated to be in the public interest. It goes on to say that consideration of such applications should include an assessment of, first: ""the need for the development, including in terms of national considerations"." This seems to push forward "need"—most likely, the Government’s renewable energy targets—as a consideration, and was certainly not something mentioned in planning policy statement 22 on renewable energy. Do the Government intend to weaken the protection here for national parks and AONBs or, as far as they are concerned, does PPS22 still apply and do national parks and AONBs have as much protection as hitherto? As we are now talking about wind farms of very considerable size, an assurance from the Minister that they will continue to enjoy as much protection is essential. I also agree with those who have criticised the NPS for not giving the IPC a role in assessing how individual developments contribute towards carbon emission targets. Here, I think that I may find myself agreeing with the right reverend Prelate. Since the pursuit of wind power, not to mention nuclear power, is all being done in aid of a purported saving of carbon emissions, why should the IPC not be able to assess the advantages of schemes proposed in terms of their carbon emission savings and use that as a criterion for granting or refusing development permission? Whether one supports the concept of the IPC, and of the NPSs to give them guidance, must in part depend on what one thinks about government energy policy. For myself, I support the long-overdue need for nuclear power as well as for more gas storage, because these will both contribute to energy security. Yet wind power has an effect in the other direction, because it threatens the destabilisation of the grid as well as misdirecting capital expenditures on a vast scale. It almost certainly does not achieve any worthwhile savings in carbon emissions. Yet the Government’s determination to try and suppress local opposition to unpopular wind farm applications is, I suspect, at least as much an explanation of why we have been saddled with the IPC as is the need for more nuclear power stations. In this context, I draw your Lordships’ attention to what I see as an anomaly in the Government’s presentation regarding our future overall electricity generation requirements. On page 9 of EN-6, the nuclear NPS, the figure of 100 gigawatts is given as our possible requirement for generation capacity by 2020. That is despite it being the Government’s belief—as we heard again this afternoon from the Minister—that our electricity usage will not rise above today’s level of 60 gigawatts which, as the Minister explained, is in itself supplied by a capacity of about 80 gigawatts. Incidentally, that figure of 100 gigawatts is mentioned in neither the overarching NPS nor, as I can find it, in EN-3. Why is such a great increase over today’s installed capacity required, when consumption is not expected to increase? The answer must surely be that these are the back-up power stations required for wind farms. Yet the only reference I can find to the need for back-up is a passing allusion on page 17 of EN-1, which is highly obfuscatory; there is no mention of figures, nor of what types of power stations will be suitable for the purpose. This evasion is doubtless explained by the Government’s wish that we should not be forced to confront the extraordinary waste and inefficiency of wind power that results in all that vast investment being entirely surplus to requirements—an optional extra which, if we are lucky, may one day supply us with a miserly percentage of our annual electricity requirement. I believe that no other country—not Denmark and not even Germany with its 20,000 turbines, 10 times our number—has raised that figure to more than 7 per cent. Moreover, I believe that the NPS seriously misleads the IPC in its repeated insistence that climate change is taking place and in what it states are the likely consequences: droughts, floods, heat waves, rising sea levels, storms, et cetera. I submit that the Government have no business using their authority to announce the future of the climate in such unequivocal and certain terms. Goodness knows what additional unnecessary expenditure a cautious IPC will, as a result, go and impose on developers. All this is at a time when the wheels give every sign of coming off the global warming bandwagon. Not only has each one of the extreme eye-catching predictions, from the plight of polar bears to the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers and the reduction in African crop yields, been exposed one by one as being based on insufficient or non-existent evidence, but the entire process on which the demonstration was based that we are in a warming period of any unusual significance, let alone one that has been caused by human activity, has now been revealed to be founded on dubious and probably manipulated measurements. In this respect, I refer those who are interested to the work of two American writers, Joseph d’Aleo and Anthony Watts, and the paper which they produced in January, entitled Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception?.