Clause 39 - Local development orders
Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill
3:30 pm
Mr Tony McNulty (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister; Harrow East, Labour)
Many of the comments made are entirely fair. As I said earlier, this is worth considering further. To answer the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet, clause 39 was drawn up to follow on from the general permitted development order rather than the development clauses that the hon. Member for Cotswold referred to. Under current law, if the Secretary of State issues an amendment to the general permitted development order, anything counter to that stops, however advanced or detailed, and planning permission must be secured in the normal fashion.
I have a lot of sympathy with the amendment, which would allow
''Any development permitted by an order revoked . . . to be completed notwithstanding the revocation''.
That would give the LDOs some degree of certainty to developers, which is partly their purpose. If a development is permitted, then when the developers start, they will not suddenly find that the commission is no longer valid if the LDO is revoked.
It is worth considering the matter further in relation to our desire to fit the development order at the local level into the broad framework of the GPDO with regard to permitted development rights. However, I accept what the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet said, notwithstanding compensation and other issues. That is not least for the reasons that his hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) alluded to about what ''started'' means in that context. Is it as sections 54 and 55 say in the 1990 Act, something more germane in the GPDO, or something in between? The matter is worthy of further scrutiny, and I should like to consider it much further.