Clause 41
Planning Bill
9:30 am
Jacqui Lait (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Beckenham, Conservative)
I am sorry that this is turning into a bit of dialogue. I will try to draw it to a conclusion. A developer would wish to be in control of the information process. He would not wish to be driven by the inadvertent disclosure of information by the IPC before he wanted it to come into the public domain. That is where the confidentiality is. I am assuming that a developer will go to the IPC before he goes to public consultation, so the IPC will have prior information. But it is surely not for the IPC to publish such information. It should remain in the control of the developer. If the IPC is not under a strict regime of confidentiality, that information stream would be affected. That is why I am so concerned to have assurances from the Minister that the IPC would be bound by confidentiality.