Clause 41 - applications for planning permission and certain consents
Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill
9:15 am
Mr Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold, Conservative)
Yes, if they had enough gumption—and, indeed, if the Minister had any gumption—they would all have looked at what the civil servants had produced and said, ''This is a load of garbage; chuck it out. It is not needed in the Bill; it clutters everything up.'' With that explanation I hope for a little common sense. We should not be tinkering with Bills for the sake of it and cluttering up the courts with the inevitable applications for judicial review, because whenever an Act is altered, lawyers find one word that is different and say that it changes the meaning of the whole section. The clause, like many others in the Bill, will simply make more work for lawyers, and that is unproductive for the wealth-creating sector.