Clause 1
Planning Bill
10:45 am
Jacqui Lait (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Beckenham, Conservative)
I am most interested in my hon. Friend’s suggestion. I envisaged many judicial review applications at the end of a hearing but not the nightmare scenario of such applications during a hearing. However, I absolutely agree with him that the potential is there because of the challenge to the skills of the commissioners. He makes a valid point.
The Government have brushed aside the issue of legal challenges time and again because it is something that no one wants to think about. At the risk of repetition, everyone wants the planning system to be speeded up but legal challenge and the opportunity to widen and open up channels for legal challenge have not been sufficiently thoroughly explored, despite the Committee’s evidence-taking sittings, because no one wants to consider that the new system has the potential to increase greatly the number of legal challenges, and, sadly, that has come through very strongly to me. When one wants something so much, one never thinks of the down side, and that creates an interesting psychological impetus.
My final point in considering matters relating to the Planning Inspectorate and whether we need to set up the commission is that there is already a planning inquiry commission—it was set up under the Town and Country Planning Act 1968 and consolidated in the Town and Country Planning Act 1971—which has never been used. It was set up with exactly the same idea of speeding up applications for big infrastructure projects, although not precisely in the way that the Bill proposes, by the right hon. Peter Shore, who was then the Member for Stepney and Poplar or Poplar and Stepney.