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It is reasonable that the Secretary of State and Parliament must be fully concerned with the national policy statements that are drawn up and approved. The Secretary of State designates and is responsible for the national policy statements and must lay them before Parliament. It remains to be settled whether parliamentary approval is to be required—I think it should be—and that is the purpose of Amendment No. 34, to which we shall come later. However, the question which now arises on Amendments Nos. 1, 2, 101 and the others is whether the Infrastructure Policy Commission, working within the national policy statements established by the Secretary of State—and, I hope, approved by Parliament—should now have the power to take the decisions on proposed developments and projects; or should it have only a consultative role, leaving the decision, or at least ratification, to the Secretary of State.

There are extensive provisions in the Bill on the pre-application procedures; for example, on the duty to consult the local community and to publicise. There are also detailed provisions on the handling of applications by the commission. I think that we can seriously ask what is to be gained by transferring the role of decision-making to the Secretary of State and reducing the Infrastructure Planning Commission to an advisory role. If we can get right the basic building blocks consisting of the national policy statements and parliamentary approval, we can leave the specific development and project decisions in the hands of the commission. We do not need to add a further stage of submission to the Secretary of State.

noon

Lord Tyler: My Lords, I should like to make a brief contribution to this very important debate. I think it is true that the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, has never been an elected representative. I have been, in a number of roles, including vice-chair of a planning committee. All of us in this House and in the other place must be very concerned at the degree of disengagement that the public feel regarding political decisions, and no more so than in planning decisions. We all know how in any community a planning issue of a major development can stir a feeling of frustration and concern which is probably never reflected in any other process in our democracy. But we are talking about a representative democracy, and that is why inserting a ministerial longstop at the very end of the process, as proposed in the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, and my noble friend Lady Hamwee, will be critical in terms of public perception. If it is not there—even if it is very rarely used—that will be interpreted as the bureaucrats having won, which would be extremely dangerous.

In our democracy it is very important that we know who will ultimately be accountable for decisions. If they get them wrong and do not, for example, reflect the policy that has been agreed by Parliament or go through the processes of consultation to which the

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noble Lord, Lord Williamson, referred, who is ultimately responsible for checking that that decision has been properly arrived at?

In my view, going to the courts is not a proper longstop. I hope that everyone in your Lordships' House agrees that regular recourse to judicial review on these matters is something that we should avoid at all costs. Therefore, it is surely much better that the final court of appeal, as it were—the final check to make sure that the process has been correct—should be a Minister rather than judges, somebody who has been elected.

I hope that the Government will reflect very carefully on what the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, and my noble friend Lady Hamwee have said. If we do not put in place that longstop, the public will interpret this change in the law as yet another move away from engagement by the public in the political process. At a time when the United States has come alive again, and people are a great deal more involved and interested in what is going to happen to them in terms of political decision-making, we would be stepping in the opposite and wrong direction.

Lord Hart of Chilton: My Lords, I oppose these amendments, which seek to make the IPC a referral body. I have carefully listened to the debates in Committee and have, of course, read Hansard. I have reflected on the arguments through the prism of my 35 years of experience in the planning arena where, for the most part, I was on the receiving end of decisions made on planning applications.

I have become more and more convinced that the Government’s architecture for the new planning approach—separating policy-making from decision-making—is correct. The years of delay inherent in the old system, which have been rehearsed many times in this House, are threefold but interlinked. First, the tangle of policy, which took much time to unravel; secondly, the lengthy processes in use at the inquiry; and, thirdly—and this is the point in question today—the delay involved in a Minister taking a decision following an inspector’s report, which often took as long as the inquiry itself. The Bill seeks to solve all these problems and, I believe, does so satisfactorily.

Let us not forget that all the delay and expense which the old system created have a deterrent effect on developers and funders alike at the very time when so much of our infrastructure is in urgent need of replacement. The amendments would reintroduce one of the elements of delay by referring back a decision of the IPC to a Secretary of State, with the lorry-loads of material gathered at the hearing going back to be trawled through by officials for a final decision by the Secretary of State. This is in the name, as I understand it, of the principle of democratic accountability. However, in Committee, this argument for accountability was shown to be quite misplaced. A Minister reaching a decision fulfils a quasi-judicial function. He is constrained; he must act independently; he is not open to parliamentary persuasion; he is not a free agent. It is said that the IPC is unaccountable, but, as the Minister pointed out on the first day of the Committee stage, while the commission is unelected, that does not mean that it is

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unaccountable. It will operate within statute, within the powers given to it. It will be appointed by a Secretary of State to whom it will report. Senior appointments are subject to pre-appointment scrutiny, and it will make full reports which will be the subject of judicial challenge. Indeed, the independence of the commission, with its body of experts, is a strength, not a weakness, and it will come to be welcomed by the public because it will not be seen to be a rubber stamp and it will not be a judge and jury.

The late Lord Denning once said in relation to a Housing Act inquiry that it was infinitely better that the man who heard the evidence and the arguments should decide the case, but that Parliament had decreed otherwise. Here, in this new system, the body which hears the evidence, finds the facts and balances the arguments will be just that, and we should welcome it. I oppose the amendments because they will bring the dangers of additional cost and delay without any corresponding benefit.

Lord Jenkin of Roding: My Lords, this has been a long-running argument. It has run through the debates in another place and has figured substantially in debates in this House at every stage of the Bill. I have received, as have, no doubt, many noble Lords, a sheaf of representations on this issue. It will not surprise noble Lords who were perhaps not in the House yesterday that I have received a lot of information and advice from those who are concerned with the energy infrastructure of this country. I have also had evidence from a variety of statutory and voluntary bodies which seek to argue the case that has been argued by my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee.

I find the argument slightly difficult. At Second Reading, I made my opinion very clear, which is that the key part of this process is the approval of the national policy statements. In Committee, I moved amendments to require that those statements be approved by both Houses of Parliament. Amendments on this Marshalled List would have the same effect. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, who said at the beginning of his speech that the structure of the Bill is the wrong way round, because the process starts with the national policy statements. When they are approved—howsoever that is done—the planning commission takes possession of the individual applications. We have to consider this the other way round, and it is a difficult process.

However, we will come to the other question later. I was delighted to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Williamson of Horton, said about that. I hope that we shall have his support for the amendment seeking affirmative approval by both Houses for the national planning statements.

One comes back, therefore, to the function of the commission. I am not sure that I would go the whole way with the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, who said that the new Secretary of State for Transport was able to take the decision on increasing the number of flights on the first runway at Stansted in a matter of six days. As Financial Secretary in 1970, I think I approved the expenditure on the Thames Barrier in rather less time than that. But, of course, it had been

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considered by Treasury officials for years before I came into office. I was puzzled as to why my predecessor had not taken the decision and signed the authorisation but, under the rules, as anyone who has served in government will know, my officials were not allowed to discuss that at all. I did not ask them, because I knew that they would not be able to tell me. So the point about the right honourable Geoff Hoon taking a decision in six days is not wholly convincing.

I have occupied the position of Secretary of State for Industry and been, therefore, concerned with industrial developments and related issues. I have been Minister for Energy and concerned with investment; in those days, it was primarily about the North Sea. But I have also held office as the Secretary of State for Environment and been responsible for the planning process. No doubt, in the eyes of applicants or opponents, I was seen to take an astonishingly long time to reach a decision required by the Secretary of State after an appeal on a planning application. So in a sense I have seen both sides of this. I was interested in the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Hart of Chilton, who has much longer experience on this matter than I do, on where he saw the balance lie.

I find this an extremely difficult decision, largely because I start from the proposition that I should like to support my Front Bench. When I was a Minister, I liked my Back-Benchers to support me, although they did not always do so and it could sometimes be rather painful. At the same time, I have been mightily impressed by the weight of evidence from those who will be responsible for producing the infrastructure investment which lies at the heart of this Bill. It is in order to accelerate the process of vastly needed investment, not just in energy but in other infrastructure projects, that the whole of the first part of the Bill has been introduced.

I addressed a conference the day before yesterday, in the City, which happened to be hosted by the City Forum and was headed “Nuclear renaissance”. I was asked to talk from the point of view of the political and planning aspects. I described for that audience on Tuesday the argument between, on the one hand, those who would hope to invest in major infrastructure projects and those responsible for bringing them forward and, on the other hand, a mixture of the environmentalists, who make their views very clear, and the constitutionalists, who feel that somehow this has to be a political decision. I said that on the whole I had the impression that the former group was winning the argument. The noble Lords, Lord Williamson of Horton and Lord Hart of Chilton, reflected what I have come to regard as perhaps the better view. I will not vote against my noble friend’s amendment but, as I have discussed with him at some length over recent weeks, I think that I shall find it difficult to vote with him. I shall probably abstain.

12.15 pm

Lord Cameron of Dillington: My Lords, I am grateful to be able to follow the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, because I, too, want the Bill to be the right way round. I believe that most of us in this House really want the Bill to work. We desperately want to speed up our ability to respond to climate change and to invest in

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modern infrastructure. Of course it would be wonderful if we could wave a wand and have a high-speed rail link up the east and west coasts of Britain and it would be nice if 50 per cent of our energy came from renewable resources and fed into a modern grid et cetera—as long as it was not in my back yard, of course.

For these projects, which, as I hinted, are almost certainly locally unpopular, to be implemented with minimum delay in our democratic society, we need the full authority of Parliament. I believe that, if we can achieve the full authority of Parliament behind the national policy statements, it will be perfectly acceptable for the IPC to implement and carry out the will of Parliament. If the NPSs have the full authority of Parliament and the IPC makes its judgment in the light of that authority, Parliament will have spoken, as the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, said in Committee, and the decision will be unchallengeable. However, if the decision were questioned or reversed by a set of civil servants answering for the Minister but at one remove from the detailed analysis of the project, that would be a travesty of democracy and justice and would probably hold up the projects for no good reason; it may even make them challengeable in court.

Why would the Secretary of State come to a different decision, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, suggested? In my view, the Secretary of State would either be taking a decision for reasons of party politics in the constituency concerned or he or she could be ignoring the recognised and overriding local circumstances, which would have been thrashed out in public at an open hearing conducted by the IPC. Thrashing things out in public and having an open decision-making process are not synonymous with the ministerial decision-making process, with which the phrase “behind closed doors” seems to fit more readily. In conclusion, I believe that if we get Clause 9 right, we will not need ministerial involvement in the IPC decisions. I therefore give my full support to the Government on this issue.

Lord Soley: My Lords, I have not spoken before on this Bill, largely because I regard it as probably the most progressive planning Bill since the last great progressive planning Bill, that of 1948. I will say a little about the Conservative Party’s policy, the evolution of which I had some involvement with, in a strange way. If the Conservatives were in government, they would strongly resist the amendment, because it strikes at the heart of the Bill. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, on the national policy statements, which I think should be the start of the process, but I agree with much else of what he said. He is right to be concerned about delays in the process.

The reality is that we have never had in this country a planning system that allows us to promote infrastructure. Britain’s infrastructure lets us down in all sorts of ways. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, when he says that people are disaffected because of bureaucracy and their inability to intervene in the planning process. I suggest that what frustrates people is their inability to understand why we cannot deliver infrastructure programmes in this country as we used to be able to do in the 19th and early 20th centuries and as Europe does now.

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I declare an interest, more for reasons of form than for reasons of substance, as a campaign director for Future Heathrow, which not only deals with the expansion of Heathrow but campaigns for the extension of the high-speed line to Heathrow and further north—I made a speech about this in Manchester two years ago. The two should go together. That hinges on one of the most important aspects of the Bill: how we deliver an integrated transport system in the UK.

As I said, the evolution of Conservative policy on this is interesting. In the 1980s, I set up an organisation called the Labour Planning and Environment Group, a group affiliated to the Labour Party and of which I was chairman. We ran a number of successful conferences and invited members of the Conservative Front Bench to speak—although not the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, who might remember those occasions—and they did. The Secretary of State spoke at them because we were drawing together local authorities and business to address problems.

We never dealt with the infrastructure problems. They were not part of the discussion then, which focused on things such as out-of-town shopping centres. However, there was recognition by all of us, almost across the political spectrum, that the infrastructure planning process in Britain was seriously flawed. We all know the importance of infrastructure—roads, railways, airports, sewers, water, the lot—but the most important part of delivering it is the planning process. If you get that wrong, an awful lot of other things go wrong as well, which is what has happened.

I do not want to speak for long, so I conclude with a—slightly long—example. When the high-speed rail line opened in 2007 between the Kent coast and Paddington it had been about nine years in construction, while the French high-speed line had already been open and running for 10 years. Why? Was it because the British are not capable of building it fast? Was it because we did not have the money? Was it because of the urban density of the south-east? There is an element of truth in that; the density of the south-east corner of the UK is a problem. But urban density is a problem in Belgium and Holland, too, but they have a high-speed line. The financing is different here from France, and the French were better at getting that through.

However, a major cause of the delay was planning. People were travelling around Europe at 180 miles per hour, then coming through the tunnel and slowing down to about 80 miles per hour—in the country that had invented the train, started the industrial revolution and achieved all the scientific progress that enabled that revolution to take place.

The construction of the high-speed lines in Europe and Britain should warn Members to think twice before voting for the amendment. If you take away the independence of the infrastructure committee and place it within a political process, certain things will happen; the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, will know this as well as I do. If I am invited, as a local resident or politician, to object to something that local people say that they do not want, I will use every weapon in my arsenal to slow it down. That has happened for years, which is why we need a system in which we accept that

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problems for local people must be addressed through compensation and other things, without seizing up the whole country because of problems in particular areas.

I beg those who are thinking of voting for the amendment—particularly the Liberal Democrats, but also the Conservatives—to go into the Library before they vote and ask for maps of transport infrastructure in the European Union countries. There is heading after heading: France, Italy, the Benelux countries and all the others, and the links between road, rail and air. That is integrated transport, to which we all pay lip service in this country but do not deliver. Looking at the maps, you get to the Channel and see one little link to London, with talk in just one section of a proposed west coast line.

Britain is left out of it. The noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, signed the single market treaty and believed in it very strongly. Whether you are pro-Europe or anti-Europe, if you are part of a single market, the last thing you want to do is design an infrastructure that excludes you from it. We are doing that, and it is a serious issue.

Noble Lords who vote for this amendment will strike at the heart of the independent process. If it is accepted, we will lurch right back into the situation, which we all agree we want to get away from, of constant delays to infrastructure projects which are necessary for the United Kingdom’s economic development. It does not help anyone if we lead people to believe that they can slow something down and stop change happening. Of course, people often object to change and of course it causes problems when it takes place, but you deal with that by addressing the problems caused for people; you do not just accept that slowing it down is a good thing.

My final warning is that if anybody thinks that either the objectors or the developer got any satisfaction at all from the planning process on terminal 5, they should forget it. It upset just about everyone. The one good thing that came out of the terminal 5 inquiry was that it made many people, myself included, go away and look at what was happening with regard to airports in continental Europe and ask why Heathrow was going downhill so fast. That was the only good thing about it. Everybody came out dissatisfied. It did us no good at all. I ask noble Lords please not to support the amendment. I ask noble Lords on the Conservative Front Bench, in view of their own history on this matter, not to push the amendment to a vote, and if they do push it to a vote, to look first at the maps of Europe and ask themselves whether they want Britain to end up as an offshore island that is cut off from the incredibly dynamic European economy, and with an infrastructure system of which we, as the first industrial power, ought to be slightly ashamed.

Lord Burnett: My Lords, I draw the House’s attention to my interests on the Register. My law firm carries out considerable planning work, in which I am sometimes involved. The inspector at the terminal 5 inquiry—a most distinguished barrister, Roy Vandermeer QC—really had his work cut out. The local plan was years and years out of date. The then Government had not

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produced proper traffic forecasts. All those things had to be sorted out by the inspector. That was not his fault. There were no national policy statements and that led to the problem.

Lord Soley: My Lords, I was not criticising the inspector in any way. I think that he did a good job. The issue was the planning structure.

Lord Burnett: My Lords, my point is that there were no national policy statements. The inspector had nothing up to date at his side to assist him in dealing with these very complex major matters.

I have a fairly straightforward question for the Minister. If the IPC’s decision is wayward, or is, in the Minister’s view, unacceptable, or if circumstances change fundamentally after it has given its decision, can the Secretary of State intervene either to quash the decision or to challenge it in a court? What powers does the Secretary of State have in those circumstances? I support the system of national policy statements. It is a sound system and Parliament should have a crucial role in it. I also support the thrust of the amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, and my noble friend Lady Hamwee. As the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, so succinctly said, the Secretary of State does not consider these matters lightly. Teams of officials work on inspectors’ reports. One should get a valid, properly scrutinised and well considered decision from a Secretary of State. These major projects are deeply political and the buck should stop with the elected Government.

12.30 pm

Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan: My Lords, I oppose the amendments, and I do so for the reasons that I explained before when we spoke about these matters. I draw attention to the fact that I have interests in the nuclear industry.

I am concerned about the apparent elevated status that ministerial involvement in this process seems to be accorded. Under the present planning system I cannot imagine even a Government whom I support, confronted with an unpleasant decision 18 to 20 months away from a general election, grasping that nettle and courting unpopularity in their constituencies. Frankly, in the unlikely event of the Liberals ever securing a place in government, I imagine that, faced with such a choice, they would do the honourable thing and resign, because their ability to grasp nettles of any kind is virtually unknown.

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