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Ports: Draft National Policy Statement

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for introducing this matter with his usual clarity and care, although I think that my grandfather Lord Attlee would have been shocked by the Minister’s sensible reliance on the market. I agree that there are problems with our planning process and that something needs to be done. I recall the enjoyment of asking Ministers questions about the cost of the T5 inquiry. We on these Benches support the concept of an NPS for the various areas of national infrastructure, but we part company on the Infrastructure Planning Commission, to which I will return. The ports NPS is unusual in that it is used for the IPC process for port developments of national significance and for the MMO for smaller developments, such as harbour extensions. I shall touch on transport networks later. With one crucial caveat, this document is an excellent piece of work. It is well laid out, clear and appears to answer all the questions comprehensively. The caveat is that all this is true if the question to be answered is: when industry desires to seek planning permission for a port or harbour development, what factors in its proposal must be taken into consideration and discussed? In written evidence to the Transport Select Committee in another place, the chair of the Infrastructure Planning Commission, Sir Michael Pitt, expressed concern that section 1 of the national policy statement fails to offer, ""a clearly and distinctly identified summary of the policy on ports"." One wonders whether this is because there is no policy to identify. The Royal Town Planning Institute, a professional body which represents 22,000 planners, also has difficulties with the Government’s draft NPS. It says that the statement, ""fails to justify the need for building any new ports"—" we know that there is a requirement— ""or give any guidance on how they should relate to road and rail networks or centres of industry or population";" and that it fails to offer, ""security for investors or for local communities that may be affected. Nor does it consider impacts on Britain’s existing ports, improvements to which may be a better option than building an entirely new port"." If the Committee requires further evidence of how little help the NPS is, I have to say that I have had very little briefing from outside bodies. Perhaps that can be explained by industry’s relief that the NPS is not geographically specific and allows the market to determine where to place capacity. However, the NPS is not very helpful about connecting transport infrastructure. There will be a problem for the IPC and the MMO. Can the Minister indicate whether the NPS on national networks will shed any light on this? How will it help them? To an extent the Minister did that in his opening comments, which I will read carefully in Hansard; so if he does not come back on the point, it is not a problem. I have had a good quality briefing from the Campaign for National Parks—not least because it was confined to just two sides. It raises some good points which concern it, but as the NPS is a list of factors to be taken into account when proposing or assessing a port development and not a series of decisions that have been taken, there are no pros and cons to be taken into consideration in today’s debate. I have a few questions for the Minister. The draft NPS appears to confuse the role of the applicant with that of the IPC in respect of environmental and security assessments. Who is responsible for carrying them out? Is it the IPC, the applicant or both? Another question arises about the safeguarding of land that could be used for port development at some point in the future. My understanding is that there are safeguarding provisions for land adjacent to existing ports; but what about potential ports or a facility that is only a harbour now but could be something much more in the future? The Minister, with his understanding of railways, can easily see how a rail alignment could be interfered with by a perfectly sensible development that is some distance inland. I am sorry that I do not have more to say on the NPS itself, but that is due to its nature. I have to say that I was rather surprised when I got my marching orders from the shadow Secretary of State, but on studying the NPS they did turn out to be apposite. On the IPC regime, we have already indicated that we would abolish the Infrastructure Planning Commission while retaining its expertise and fast-track process. We would do this by creating a specific unit for major infrastructure projects—the major infrastructure unit—with its own special character within a revised departmental structure that includes the Planning Inspectorate. At the same time, we would integrate the national policy statements into our revised and simplified system of national panning guidance in order to achieve the outcome that we all desire. I think that there is little doubt that a genuine NPS approved by Parliament would be helpful in this process. At the conclusion of the inquiries, planning inspectors from the major infrastructure unit would make recommendations to the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State would then be required to make a final decision on the application within a specified time limit on the basis of the material presented, and, of course, the Secretary of State is democratically accountable to Parliament. I look forward to the Minister’s response.