Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
16 MARCH 2009 SIR
MICHAEL PITT
Q60 John Cummings: You are talking
in terms of £10 million a year?
Sir Michael Pitt: £9.3 million
a year.
Q61 John Cummings: For 35 commissioners?
Sir Michael Pitt: Indeed.
Q62 John Cummings: For support staff
and remuneration for the board members?
Sir Michael Pitt: Yes.
Q63 John Cummings: Are you confident
that can be achieved?
Sir Michael Pitt: I am relying
heavily upon the work of officials who have been evaluating the
costs and it does seem to make sense.
Q64 John Cummings: How would you
maintain morale and performance given the uncertainty of the future
of the IPC?
Sir Michael Pitt: I suppose by
my enthusiasm for what is being done. I am a huge believer in
the role of the IPC. I am really sure that, even if certain aspects
of the IPC's role were to change in the future, nevertheless the
huge economies that can be made by having a Commission will be
more widely recognised. I have never had any real problem in enthusing
people with the things that I want to get done. I think the Commission
will be optimistic about the future and I think we will be highly
motivated.
Q65 John Cummings: Can you remind
me of the number of board members?
Sir Michael Pitt: I have to be
careful here. The number of commissioners—
Q66 John Cummings: No, not commissioners;
board members.
Sir Michael Pitt: There is nothing
written down yet about the nature of the board that runs the IPC.
My preliminary thoughts on this are that the board would comprise
the Chair of the Commission, the two Deputy Chairs, the three
Commissioners who are currently being recruited, the Chief Executive
of the Commission and the immediate reports to the Chief Executive
of which there will be either three or four. That will form a
corporate board to run the business and that I see as something
quite separate from the council that we talked about a little
bit earlier and the wider commissioners.
Q67 Sir Paul Beresford: £9.3
million is a Civil Service guesstimate. Most people on this Committee
would agree that the economic situation in this country is pretty
disastrous. Therefore, an educated guess would be that the number
of applications will be perhaps down next year and as the economy
starts to come up, applications are likely to go up. There will
be other fluctuations. A couple of JRs would knock a hell of a
hole in £9.3 million if you lost them. Is there a rollover?
What happens if you are under or over budget?
Sir Michael Pitt: It is important
that the Commission is adaptive, elastic. I think it has to be
able to grow and shrink rapidly according to the workload concerned.
That is why for example I think it is right to have a large number
of the commissioners on what I call a call off contract. You employ
them when they are needed and when they are not needed they are
rested and not being paid. Likewise with the administration itself,
the secretariat. I think it should be quite flexible in terms
of the numbers of staff. Try and keep them to the bare minimum.
Bring in temporary staff from time to time, perhaps bring in consultants
from time to time, to support the Commission, but I did not imagine
for one minute that we would recruit to a certain size and then
regard that as more or less static. I think we are going to be
growing and shrinking according to the economic situation.
Q68 Sir Paul Beresford: Your budget
is always going to stay the same.
Sir Michael Pitt: If we can underspend
that budget, that will be money that is saved to the public purse.
Q69 Sir Paul Beresford: It will not
be a rollover. What if you overspend?
Sir Michael Pitt: I do not like
anybody who overspends.
Q70 Sir Paul Beresford: A couple
of JRs —?
Sir Michael Pitt: Yes. The policy
is about no surprises. If there is a risk, all good corporate
boards have risk management. Part of the risk management is trying
to manage a fluctuating workload and the possibility of judicial
review. If it looks as though there is the possibility of an overspend,
first of all, it should be signalled very early in the financial
year. Secondly, there should be urgent conversations with the
officials within CLG to talk about whether or not that budget
is adequate. If I felt that, because of circumstances beyond my
control, the Commission was going to be underfunded in any particular
year, I would take that up directly with the minister concerned
and spell out clearly what the consequences would be of being
underfunded.
Q71 Mr Turner: Excuse my ignorance
but I know local authorities charge for planning applications.
Does the IPC? If so, in what kind of range?
Sir Michael Pitt: The intention
is that there will be fees. Proposers will have to make a payment
when they submit their application. At the moment, work is being
done on working out a scale of fees. I have no idea what those
fees are going to be. They will be finally decided by the minister
concerned. If you wanted my tuppence worth on how to do this,
I would say that there would be a base funding for the Commission
and then the fee would be equivalent to the variable cost. Every
time an extra application comes in, there would be some additional
costs arising and that would make a good basis for the fee itself.
I have no particular idea at the moment exactly how these fees
are going to be calculated.
Q72 Chair: Would you expect to be
involved in working out the fee structure?
Sir Michael Pitt: I would hope
that all aspects of CLG's work, subject to my appointment, would
be discussed with the Commission and with me if it was a major
issue. The impression I have at the moment is that the officials
I have been working with are extremely open to discussion and
conversations about all things.
Q73 Chair: Can we move on to the
national policy statements? How closely would you expect to be
involved in drawing up national policy statements?
Sir Michael Pitt: The policy statements
are a matter for the individual government departments and for
the Secretaries of State concerned. One would expect the lion's
share of activity and work to be done in those departments. Nevertheless,
I would hope that there would again be conversations between the
Commission and myself and those government departments and ministers,
because it is important to look at those statements from the perspective
of the IPC. After all, it is because of the creation of the IPC
that this has all been brought forward in the Planning Act.
Q74 Chair: What would you need to
be within the national policy statement for it to be a useful
document for the IPC?
Sir Michael Pitt: I am probably
mentioning judicial review too many times in this conversation.
What we can anticipate is that if there are judicial reviews legal
minds will be poring over every word, dot and comma in the national
policy statements. The perspective that the IPC can give is where
we think that the form of the drafting of those statements could
be improved to avoid the risk of judicial review.
Q75 Chair: Do you mean made more
explicit?
Sir Michael Pitt: Absolutely,
but also to help the Commission and the Commissioners in their
judgments because having great clarity in a policy statement first
of all puts the responsibility where it belongs with the Secretary
of State and secondly clarifies the role of the Commission. If
it is ambiguous and uncertain in the policy statement, then I
think it makes the job of the Commissioners very much harder.
Q76 Mr Betts: In giving that advice,
will that be publicly available advice or will it be private conversations
with ministers?
Sir Michael Pitt: The Freedom
of Information Act seems to make almost everything open to the
public these days. I think all of us tend to conduct our business
these days on the basis that, if it is not already public, then
it is going to be made public at some stage. I see no reason why
the IPC should not make its views known. In fact, if I could just
broaden that question to a wider point, I think pretty well all
of the business of the IPC should be in the public domain. I see
no reason why all the various documents prepared by the IPC, correspondence
the IPC might be having with applicants or objectors or different
interest groups, should not be on the website. I would like to
think that, as far as we humanly can, we would make our business
as transparent as possible.
Q77 Mr Betts: In terms of that process
of commenting on the policy statements, we certainly have discussions
with ministers about the parliamentary role of scrutiny in terms
of the policy statements. In the end it will be a government decision
but Parliament can look at the statements in advance of the final
decision. Would you be looking to make any comments you would
have at a time when they were going to be available for a select
committee, say, which does the scrutiny of the policy statements
to have regard to them before it makes its final scrutiny recommendations?
Sir Michael Pitt: If any select
committee thought that there was something useful that the IPC
or I, as chair, could add to that conversation, I would be very
happy to participate.
Q78 Chair: Were you to be appointed
and, at the end of the five years, you wished to be considered
for reappointment, what do you think should be used to assess
your initial five year term and to decide whether you should be
given another three?
Sir Michael Pitt: That is probably
partly what Mr Cummings was asking me about as well. If I could
just repeat one or two of the points I did make then, it is really
important that a cross-section of people and political parties
believe that the IPC has been a great success. I would be particularly
delighted if objectors also felt that they had a better hearing,
that the arrangements were more effective. I would like to think
that the Commission has made a difference in terms of the provision
of infrastructure for the country, that the country has—whether
it is the transport system or the energy suppliers or whatever—what
the country really needs. Although we are not entirely responsible
for that of course, it should always be in the backs of the minds
of commissioners that that is one of our roles, that we are there
to help facilitate the provision of that critical infrastructure.
I would be quite delighted if we had not been judicially reviewed
but I am not sure if that is possible. If we are judicially reviewed,
we should win our cases by the sheer force and quality of the
arguments that we have presented. One thing that we have not talked
about at all is the conditions which are placed on planning approvals.
This is not just a binary yes/no decision. The Commission has
a big role to play, I believe, in ensuring that the mitigating
factors that minimise the environmental and other impacts of the
locality of a new development can be minimised as far as possible.
One of the areas where we can add a lot of value is in ensuring
that those conditions placed on approvals are well thought through
and sometimes probably quite challenging in terms of what they
demand of the applicants.
Q79 Chair: Do you have any powers
to enforce them?
Sir Michael Pitt: The enforcement
of conditions is undertaken by the local authority. They are drafted
and approved by the Commission and then handed to the local authority
to ensure that they are implemented.
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