Clause 44
Planning Bill
9:30 am
Clive Betts (Sheffield, Attercliffe, Labour)
I am pleased to hear that attendance at our Committee sittings is having a beneficial effect on your health, Mr. Illsley.
In my previous amendments, I raised the issue of the Secretary of State rather than the commission being responsible for the ultimate decision on applications for national infrastructure projects, which the Government may have thought was contrary to their intentions. However, these amendments go very much with the grain of what they intend.
The Royal Town Planning Institute has been helpful to me in drafting the amendments and helping me to understand their general intention, which is to enhance the Bill to ensure that communities have a genuine opportunity to identify the impact of proposals at the earliest possible stage, to comment on them and to raise concerns about siting and design. It is relatively easy to make changes to projects at an early stage; any adverse impact identified by the community can be laid down very clearly at that point and the applicants must respond formally to it.
Amendment No. 326 relates to the pre-application stage. Pre-application consultation is essential; issues that may result in a fight at a later stage, with the two sides hardly listening to each other, can be dealt with in time to reach a compromise before things go any further. That would improve the entire process.
Communities should have the opportunity to identify issues at the earliest stage. The applicant must respond to those concerns formally, and if mitigation is not possible, explain why. Despite the importance that many planning authorities now attach to pre-consultation on ordinary planning applications, all too often those processes are neither effective nor real, as we as individual MPs have seen. They are sometimes little more than a sham. Although the community raises concerns, the applicant might hardly attempt to respond in any meaningful way and sometimes ignores them by talking about anything other than those concerns when responding to the planning committee. The amendments, therefore, would require the applicant to respond to such concerns in a proper way. They would not, of course, have to agree with those concerns, but they would have to answer them.