---

Localism Bill

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has masterfully reduced what could have been a very long speech into one that lasted less than 10 minutes. There has been some confusion about this whole matter. The group of amendments that I moved in Committee on 19 July contained a large number of separate and discrete subjects. The amendments that I moved were concerned primarily with ensuring a seamless transition from the existing IPC procedure to the NSIP procedure. I will not go into the details now but my noble friend Lord Attlee very kindly said that there should be discussions on this. Those who were advising me on this matter did have discussions with officials in the department. The result was that when we approached Report stage, when I asked them whether they had achieved what they were looking for, they said yes. Therefore, I have not retabled those amendments. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has rightly said, there were other amendments, a lot of which were aimed at the proposition that there should be a one-stop shop. As I understand it—I am open to correction—for some reason the meeting with officials did not take place until last week. There was a misunderstanding about who was seeking to organise the meeting and make sure that proper discussions could take place. I think that the meeting took place on 13 October, with the result that the large number of amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, were tabled only on Friday and appeared with an asterisk in this morning’s revised Marshalled List. I had not realised that they would appear on the Marshalled List. I have made inquiries and I have a great deal of information on this issue but most of them are the same as those we discussed on 19 July in Committee, although there are one or two additional ones to which no doubt attention will be drawn at some stage. Whether it was the fault of my noble friend on the Front Bench or of those who have been advising us, the fact of the matter is that there have not been the discussions that there should have been and that my noble friend offered when he wound up the debate on 19 July. Therefore, we are in a slight difficulty on this. I hope that the request of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, that serious meetings should be held before Third Reading so that we can, if necessary, retable the amendments, or some of them, at that stage and have them debated will be taken note of. I am getting a little alarmed about the number of issues which we are reserving for Third Reading. I am told by the Whips that we are likely to have only one day for that stage so we may find ourselves sitting even later then than we are likely to do tonight. However, I also have two new amendments in this group about which I would like to say a few words. This is a question of how and when a planning application can be referred to the NSIP procedure. There is a process in the Bill whereby the Secretary of State can call in an application and ask that the NSIP procedure should be applied but it also provides that anyone can make a qualifying request. It is astonishing that anyone can make a qualifying request. It has been put to me that that is a great deal too inclusive. Anybody could take a controversial project that that they did not like that was being put forward to the local authority and say, ““Right, it should go to the planning inspectorate under the NSIP procedure””. My first amendment restricts who can make a qualifying request to the prospective promoter and the relevant authority—the authority to whom the application would ordinarily have been made. My second amendment introduces a cut-off date. It is rather like some of the points mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley: the more delays that you build into this process the more the infrastructure that is needed will itself be delayed. I know that it is my noble friend’s intention that these procedures should operate as swiftly and effectively as possible while at the same time giving local communities the right to be heard and to present their case. Of course, all the pre-application consultations that are now required, which are a very important part of the NSIP procedure, are now in place and are happening. I get the newsletter from the IPC regularly when it is issued and it is fascinating to see how many applications it is now considering that have gone through a pre-application procedure. If we are then to have people entitled to say that an ordinary application should be handled by the NSIP procedure rather than by the local authority, it cannot be without limit. Therefore, the amendment says that it should be done before the application has actually been made. All the pre-application procedure will have told them and objectors may then say, ““This ought to go through the NSIP procedure””. Once the application is made to a local authority, that should be that, and the application should then be heard by the local planning authority. These are two new points that stand a little apart from those of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and the amendments are different from the amendments that I moved in Committee which I have not retabled. They have merit and I hope that my noble friend will consider them sympathetically.