New clause 15 - Old mining permissions
Planning and Compulsory Purchase (Re-committed) Bill
6:00 pm
Mr Keith Hill (Minister of State (Housing and Planning), Office of the Deputy Prime Minister; Streatham, Labour)
I find this aspect of the Bill especially interesting. New clause 15 deals with a limited category of old mining permissions that were created by wartime interim development orders between 1943 and 1948 and regularised in the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. A special scheme was established in the Planning and Compensation Act 1991 to provide for the registration of those old permissions and for the approval of appropriate new operating conditions. Because Crown immunity applied to the 1991 Act, there is a possibility, albeit a remote one, that there may be permissions on Crown land that have never been registered or made subject to the requirement to apply for, and have determined, an appropriate modern scheme of working conditions. The new clause therefore restarts the clock for this class of permissions by substituting the date of commencement of this Bill, when enacted, for the essential date specified in the 1991 Act.
Government amendments Nos. 51 and 52 follow on from the new clause. Old mining permissions reviewed
under the 1991 Act are then subject to later reviews at 15-year intervals under schedule 14 to the Environment Act 1995. That Act was not subject to Crown immunity, but it remains necessary to amend it to deal with the possibility that the Crown exemption under the 1991 Act was misapplied. It allows any modern working conditions erroneously applied to mineral sites on Crown land to be redetermined correctly. This could have happened if the permission were held by a leaseholder who registered the permission not realising that the Crown was exempt. We therefore need to provide for redetermination.
I fully confess that I do not expect that many, if any, permissions will fall under the scope of the amendments, but it is impossible to be sure. My Department will contact other Departments and Crown bodies with a possible interest to alert them to the provision and to the time limits that it contains.
New clause 44 makes the same changes to Scottish planning legislation as new clause 15. It is thought that the changes in amendments Nos. 51 and 52 are to some extent already dealt with in existing Scottish planning legislation. However, the Scottish Executive are considering what further amendments might be needed to give effect to the policy intention, which is the same for Scotland.