Clause 1
Planning
4:00 pm
John Healey (Minister of State (Local Government), Department for Communities and Local Government; Wentworth, Labour)
I admire the gusto with which Committee members are tackling this issue, and their difficulty in holding themselves back from diving into matters that we will consider in detail under schedule 1. I am conscious of your guidance to the Committee, Mr. Illsley.
Clause 1 is relatively limited in scope and basically says that it introduces schedule 1, which contains all the detail that Committee members have mentioned. I will take this discussion as fair warning and considerate early notice of the sort of points that we will discuss later. I only wish that some of my officials were here a little earlier to hear those remarks. Most of them may be in their place now, which is a relief to me if not to Opposition Members.
We had a broad-ranging debate this morning on the nature of the Infrastructure Planning Commission and its principal purpose and potential alternatives, to which I am sure we will return as we consider schedule 1 in more detail. Essentially, amendments Nos. 3 and 46, as the hon. Member for Beckenham said, would require the Secretary of State to lay a statutory instrument before Parliament. They would make this subject to affirmative resolution in both Houses, and would require that before the IPC could be set up. In addition, amendment No. 1 seeks to restrict the functions conferred upon the IPC to those under the Bill, preventing additional functions from being conferred under any other Acts.
I will step back, as the hon. Member for Beckenham attempted to do. Simply amending the rules for other regimes, as we did a few years ago for the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, and sitting back to see how those 2005 changes might work in practice, does not measure up to the task confronting us. That simply does not measure up to the imperative to put provisions in place as part of trying to meet some of the big challenges on climate change, energy, energy supply and security and the economic future for this country.
The reason why I describe the situation in those terms is that we expect to have national policy statements for key sectors, particularly the energy field, produced and in place during 2009. We expect to have the IPC in place and able to start considering applications in 2009. In 2009, it will be possible to anticipate the first application under the changes introduced in 2005. In other words, to sit back and see how the 2005 changes might work in practice would be a prescription for sitting back and doing nothing about dealing with and preparing ourselves for some of the decisions that we need to face up to in this country.
Mrs. Lait rose—