Clause 15 - Minerals and waste development scheme
Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill
10:00 am
Mr David Wilshire (Spelthorne, Conservative)
A couple of points in the amendment are relevant to my constituency duties. God, in his wisdom, put Spelthorne slap on the top of a huge supply of gravel and much as we would like the gravel to be moved elsewhere to stop us suffering from it, no one can decide how to do it. I fully support the general points made by my hon. Friends the Members for Mole Valley and for Chipping Barnet, but I want to take things a little further and explore some difficulties that arise whatever approach is taken to mineral extraction.
Paragraph (a) refers to
''making prudent use of natural resources''.
I wholly accept what my hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet said about prudent use being the driving force, but up until now there has been pressure—not wholly unacceptable from a constituency point of view—to say that there is a dilemma over the maximum extraction of a resource in a particular place and the time that that will take. We should not overlook that. If one takes a deposit of gravel and works it right through to the bitter end, there is always a danger that it will go on for so long that the local people who have to suffer the inconvenience will say, ''Hang on, this is taking too long.''
We should not rush towards prudent use as the only consideration. I readily accept that it may need to be the primary consideration, but there is a danger in thinking only about prudent use and overlooking the fact that that could create additional problems for nearby residents. In going down this route, we should not overlook the local people, who might, on the face of it, appear to be the very people who would be in favour of prudent use and maximum extraction from the site. I agree that there is also a danger, whether we are talking about coal mines or gravel pits, of saying
that it is easy to extract two thirds, but difficult and lengthy to extract the rest, so we will ignore it. That is not prudent use. However, stretching the process out over a longer period would cause other problems, which need to be taken into account.
Paragraph (c) mentions
''the requirement for an environmental capacity assessment''.
From a CPRE perspective, I understand only too well what that is driving at, but I draw the Committee's attention to the fact that the amendment mentions only an ''environmental capacity assessment''. I want to focus for a moment on the built environment; it is easy to perceive it as the natural environment for spoiling the countryside, but when one is considering gravel workings in a constituency such as mine, one needs to make an assessment about the ability of the built environment to cope with what is being proposed.
One of the biggest problems that I have, and I know that other Members have the same difficulty, is that the strategic, regional or local plans for the best use of mineral resources state that resources must be taken from a certain place. That becomes policy and is usually used in planning inquiries when there is hostility. People say, ''This is the county plan that says that this must happen.'' The built environment—I am thinking in particular about roads in villages—is sometimes incapable of handling the situation, yet there is no strategic plan that says, ''We want to work these resources, but they may not be worked until such time as the following improvements have been made to the infrastructure.'' Plans also tend not to say, ''and we will make the resources available for that to happen.''
As long as the debate on the amendment acknowledges the tension between prudent use and the length of time that that will take, and also that environmental capacity must encompass the built as well as the natural environment, the amendment undoubtedly has my support.