Clause 50
Planning Bill
2:00 pm
Bob Neill (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Bromley and Chislehurst, Conservative)
I do not disagree with the principle of the hon. Gentleman’s point. I am always willing to try to be an honest broker between him and the Minister. If we split the difference in this case, between 28 and 56, we do indeed arrive at 42 days. That is perhaps the only logical justification for 42 days that I have yet heard since it was produced. We may have answered the question of my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon, and found a reason, for once, for the figure of 42 days which is principled as well as pragmatic.
I wish to make a different, although related, point on our amendments, moving from the time aspect to minimum standards of publicity for the application. As anyone who has looked at good practice in the planning field will know, we have adapted what is good practice anyway—giving two consecutive weeks’ notice in the local newspaper and the Gazette, ensuring that it is posted up in a reasonably convenient location, because one can imagine a large rural area where getting to the local civic centre is quite a trek for people, and recognising the right to obtain copies at a reasonable cost. None of that is in the slightest bit onerous to an applicant for the sort of applications that we are considering. Perhaps the Government intend that those things should happen in practice, but our amendments spell out more specifically rights that are valuable, especially to the individual concerned. They do not harm the scheme of the Bill either.
Even at an advanced hour, there is occasionally the opportunity for a degree of flexibility and charity. I know that the Minister is a charitable man at heart. The amendments would be a concession to the smaller people, which would do no harm at all to the Government’s objectives, and would not hurt anyone. Against that background, I hope that he reflects favourably on them.