Member

The worry is that this interposes a further delay. In practice, that need not be the case. For example, the 2013 regulations were brought in essentially to facilitate the Thames Tideway tunnel, and what happened in practice was that the financial close with Bazalgette Tunnel Ltd and the designation as an infrastructure provider happened on the same day. So there is absolutely no reason why these processes should not be able to be compressed. For example, on the Section 35 direction sought by Anglian Water to designate the Fens reservoir as a nationally significant infrastructure project, the letter to the department went in on 22 April and the letter from the department agreeing it was so designated was on 14 May. But the point that I noted when I looked at all these things was that the letter from the department says that, subsequently, whoever is the infrastructure provider must be designated as such under the 2013 regulations. So it all neatly ties together.