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Localism Bill

My Lords, if I understand my noble friend’s proposition, it is that the hydraulic fracturing of underground rock will be brought within the national infrastructure projects regime, the planning regime that deals with major projects. I think that is central to what my noble friend is moving. We have had a wider debate about the potential importance of shale gas, what that might mean and the risks associated with it. It seems to me that we need a broader regime that encompasses all those issues: licensing regimes, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, not only to deal with exploration, but with exploitation as well. If there is to be no national infrastructure projects approach to this, then planning, presumably, is a matter for local planning authorities and, indeed, neighbourhood planning. That does not seem to me to fit well with something that is potentially of huge national significance, with potentially huge risks and uncertainties attached to it. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said that this issue is worthy of a further debate. Perhaps when we have debated the NPPF to death we might turn our attention to it. I am a novice on this, but it is a fascinating and hugely important issue. I can remember when North Sea oil first opened up. It was a project on which I worked in my former life and I know some of the debate that went on around that. However, if I understand it correctly, my noble friend’s proposition about the environment within which the planning ought to be considered is a straightforward one, and he makes a good case.