Control of Office and Industrial Development Bill

Part of Ballot for Notices of Motions – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 14 April 1965.

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Photo of Mr George Darling Mr George Darling , Sheffield, Hillsborough 12:00, 14 April 1965

The hon. Member for Wanstead and Woodford (Mr. Patrick Jenkin) has, I think, answered all these Amendments, including his own support for Amendment No. 14. He agreed with us that Amendment No. 12 and Amendment No. 13 ought not to be carried, for very good reasons, and he concentrated his support on Amendment No. 14 and particularly to the word "full" in the demand for reasons to be given to the applicant if an application for an office development permit is turned down. It is precisely because we want to help applicants that we cannot accept the proposal that full reasons should be given.

The hon. Member went on to explain that the industrial development certificate procedure works very well indeed. In practically every case where an I.D.C. is turned down, because of the way in which it is operated—the flexible, constructive and intelligent way it is operated by the Board of Trade—the applicant who has had his application refused knows precisely why it has been refused. in spite of the fact, as the hon. Member himself said, that there may be cases—and it is a minority of cases we are concerned about—where we get a number of applications for a site and the Board has to turn down all but one of them and does not give reasons till the final settlement is fixed up.

The hon. Member himself has a good deal of experience of this, I know, and he will understand the circumstances. We cannot accept this Amendment, because it might happen that we would want some discretion to be held by the Board of Trade. There may be circumstances in which for precisely the same reasons as apply under the I.D.C. procedure we do not want to give, and cannot give, the full reasons at the time, and I repeat that it is precisely for that reason that we cannot accept Amendment No. 14. We are very glad indeed to have the support of the hon. Member for turning down Amendment No. 12 and Amendment No. 13.

I repeat again to the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. John Hall) what I said in Committee, that the Franks Committee was examining administrative tribunals; it was not examining the I.D.C. procedure, because this is not done under the administrative tribunals procedure. We are going to apply to the office development procedure what applies to the I.D.Cs., and, therefore, the Franks Committee's proposals and recommendations in regard to administrative tribunals have no relevance to what we are here considering. Therefore, I suggest that the Amendment be rejected.