Planning Bill
12:00 pm
Robert Upton: Our thanks to the Committee for the invitation to give oral evidence. I should explain that the Royal Town Planning Institute exists to advance the art and science of planning and that is, among other things, to promote good practice in planning and to contribute to the formulation of policy and legislation. We have been actively involved in discussing proposals for planning reform over quite a few years now and we are broadly supportive of the proposals in the Bill, but we have two major concerns, which I would like to flag up at the beginning.
The first relates to the national policy statements and their role in the new procedure that is proposed. As we see it, the whole system proposed for development consents for major infrastructure projects depends entirely on the adequacy of those national policy statements. In our view, there are four tests that must be met there: clarity; consistency with each other; credibility in terms of the evidence base in the consultation; and the extent to which they manage to be location specific, that is, that they give a sufficiently clear indication of what is required so that impacts can reasonably be assessed. We think that it is essential that the Infrastructure Planning Commission should be required to make an annual report to Parliament on the adequacy of the statements with which it is working, to give a suitable degree of parliamentary scrutiny.
Our second major concern of principle relates to the provision under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 for local member review bodies, which we see as a major breach of the 1947 settlement, which separated the decision-taking from the appeal process.