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Localism Bill

My Lords, I shall speak briefly to Amendment 153AM and to express some sympathy with it. I very much welcome the principle of pre-application consultation in a range of applications, particularly for major projects and so on. It has been working in Scotland and there are some benefits to that because there is the ability then to take into account at an early stage the product of that consultation and to feed it back in. My worry is the one expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, about the rigidity that can creep into the statutory provisions that can sometimes provide a hurdle for developers to get over—and, frankly, they cannot do without lawyers' advice. While I am more than happy for lawyers to be employed on this, there are limits. I ask the Government to see whether or not we can get a system that puts the principles into the statute but leaves a lot of the way in which it is done to guidance, and we should not thereby get into a situation where applications fail because one person who might have been expected to be consulted has not been—or something of that nature. That is not to detract in any way from the principle that there must be adequate consultation and, within it, an obligation on the individual developer or applicant to respond positively to the consultation exercise. Let us not get into a rigidity.