Lord Banner (Con)

My Lords, Amendment 64 has been packaged in the media, and even in the Marshalled List, as augmenting the Secretary of State’s power to call in an application, but, as the Minister made clear in opening, in fact it does not do that. It leaves Section 77 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, which is the call-in power, unchanged. What it actually does is augment the holding power, under Section 74 of the 1990 Act, so that the Secretary of State can issue restrictions on the refusal of planning permission to facilitate consideration of the call-in power. In that context, I seek some clarification from the Minister as to what is intended procedurally, were this amendment to become law. Currently, there are procedural safeguards in place in relation to called-in planning applications: there is a statutory safeguard in Section 77(5), which gives either the applicant or the local planning authority the right to be heard before an inspector appointed by the Secretary of State. That, plainly, will not be changed, because there is no proposal to amend Section 77, but the obligation for the Secretary of State to cause a hearing to be heard is also the subject of a policy that exists in the Planning Inspectorate’s guidance on call-in proceedings. The policy in the Planning Inspectorate guidance is that the right of a local authority or an applicant to be heard under Section 77(5) is to be exercised by means of the inquiry procedure. The public inquiry procedure, of course, allows for greater scrutiny of the evidence and greater public participation than a mere one-day informal hearing. Is the Minister prepared to offer a commitment on behalf of the Government that there will be no dilution of the procedural safeguard in the Planning Inspectorate’s published policy and that the right of a local planning authority to insist on an inquiry and to exercise its statutory right to be heard through the inquiry procedure, as opposed to a lesser procedure, will not be diluted and will remain?