Clause 26
Finance Bill
6:00 pm
Mark Hoban (Shadow Minister, Treasury; Fareham, Conservative)
I know. The road was planned when I was elected in 2001, and has been completed only recently. The reason why it has taken so long to complete is that the county council looked at the cost of removing the knotweed, and thought it easier to poison it and allow it to die naturally rather than try to dig it out. So, I think that people will welcome the fact that Japanese knotweed is covered by the measure, although they might regret the fact that it has taken rather longer than expected to get to this point.
I want to raise with the Minister a few points that emerged from the regulatory impact assessment. The cost of the measure is about £30 million to £40 million a year over a five-to-10 year period, so there is an aggregate cost of somewhere between £150 million and £400 million, but in the RIA, there is no monetised amount for the benefit of that cost. Will the Minister indicate how much land she thinks will be brought forward for development as a consequence of the measure? Alternatively, have the Government been waiting so long that the measure will not bring forward any land at all? I am interested to know what work they have done to understand the benefits and the sort of sites that would come forward for development that have not been coming forward, so we can protect some of our greenfield sites and allow these contaminated brownfield sites to be developed.
According to the RIA, very few people would be disadvantaged by the measure, but one group that will be disadvantaged are those who deal with knotweed currently and send it to landfill sites. Are there many contractors who just take it to landfill sites? What will be the impact on the landfill levy of the introduction of this remediation relief, which will reduce the number of people taking knotweed to landfill sites? I presume that the cost has been netted off, or factored in, to the RIA.