Clause 43
Commons Bill [Lords]
2:00 pm
James Paice (Shadow Minister (Agriculture & Rural Affairs), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; South East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
It may be a great clause, but I want to invite the Minister to explain, briefly, why that is. Without rehashing the ground that we have already covered, I should like to make two points. The first is that the Minister said earlier that the clause is specifically intended for minor and temporary works; that is its purpose. It does not say so anywhere, so I invite him to clarify that point. If that is the intention of the clause, should it not say so?
The second point is that subsection (1), which defines the orders, makes a lot of specific statements about
“the carrying out by a specified person of specified works on specified land; or...by a specified person, or a person of a specified description, of works of a specified description,”
and so on. The orders are going to be so specific that one wonders whether they will be of any value for exemptions. Officials of the national authority will have to do so much work looking at such a proposal to decide whether to exempt it that they might as well approve it. I had understood from the Minister’s interventions under clause 38 about this clause that it would deal with the problems that Opposition Members have mentioned, rather than unnecessarily requiring the national authority to deal with piffling—the Minister himself used the word trivial—issues.
As drafted, the clause does not achieve the objective that the Minister has proclaimed for it. I accept and support his remarks, but they do not reflect what clause 43 says. I suggest that, by the time officials have done all the work described in the clause in order to decide whether to exempt any work, the time, bureaucracy and cost—not just to the taxpayer but to the applicant—will have been so great that they might as well have gone through the approval procedure. That was the straightforward point that I wanted to make. I look forward to the Minister’s trying to clarify it for us.