Clause 45
Planning Bill
1:00 pm
Bob Neill (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Bromley and Chislehurst, Conservative)
I am delighted to see the Minister back in his place. I know that he has had a busy lunch time. We hope that he remains with us and is not reshuffled or promoted anywhere, after the multi-tasking he was doing on the lunch-time news. We do not want him to go until we have seen the guidance on the Welsh elements of the Bill. We hope that there will not be any drift in the Wales Office in preparing those, for obvious reasons.
To return to the point that I was making, the amendment relates to advice for potential applicants and others. I was discussing a concern that the Campaign to Protect Rural England raised in their written submissions, which has also been raised with us by a number of practitioners in the field.
It is not a problem with the giving of advice and assistance, as I hope that I have already made clear. I do not have any problem with greater use of pre-application discussions, for example, between applicants. It is sensible to involve other affected parties at that early stage, hence our reference to the great success of the Shortlands scheme in the London borough of Bromley, between the constituencies of my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham and myself—just to eke out the press release.
The concern raised is over the propriety of the commission being the organisation to give that advice. That concern arises because, ultimately, the commission has to act as the decision maker in the process; it must be the holder of the ring. The commission must maintain the confidence both of applicants and of affected parties, for reasons that we have rehearsed at considerable length, and that I will not repeat.
Against that background, is there a risk that, if the commission is the giver of advice, its impartiality as the decision maker will be compromised? That is why we put forward in our amendment an alternative formulation and suggest that other Government agencies could happily provide that function.
For example, the Planning Inspectorate, the planning advisory service, and the advisory team for large applications already exist. If they were used, and we leave it open in our amendment as to which would be most convenient, there would be the advantage of ensuring that bodies discrete from the decision maker provided advice to applicants. There could not then be even any suggestion of discussions behind the scenes that might be misinterpreted by those who are affected and are unhappy at applications. It would enable the commission, if we are to have one, in spite of our reservations, to be more readily seen than Caesar’s wife in the matter, so to speak. In essence, that is the reason for the amendments. I hope that the Minister will realise that we are trying to be helpful to the work done by the commission.