Clause 30
Greater London Authority Bill
5:00 pm
Michael Gove (Shadow Minister (Housing), Communities and Local Government; Surrey Heath, Conservative)
I fear that the Minister probably is not as familiar with the order as she should be, because if she were aware of precisely how tall buildings are dealt with in it and in the pre-existing one, she would recognise that tall building legislation does apply to specific sites: those that are adjacent to the Thames and those that are in the City of London. The order is geographically specific, and it includes other details.
I take the Minister’s point, but her Department has a generalised policy on, for example, zero-carbon development, and the Secretary of State exercises his or her power on specific planning applications within that framework. The Minister introduced the Olympic exception, as it will become known hereafter, so she is the person who has erected the hurdle, and she is the person who will fall at it. We cannot allow the clauses to become part of the Bill when they have such a weakly defined and contradictory order as their basis, and that is why I reluctantly confess that we shall vote against them.