Viscount Hanworth (Lab)

My Lords, I am pleased to move Amendment 23 in my name; I believe it to be of fundamental importance. A similar amendment, Amendment 52, was moved on day one in Committee on 17 July by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and I spoke in support of it. The amendment was not supported universally in the House, and it has since been modified to take account of the advice of officials from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and indeed of the noble Lord, Lord Banner. The noble Lord, Lord Banner, was concerned that it should be made clear that the provisions of the amendment should apply only to infrastructure projects of significant national importance. In July, I observed that our planning system has become sclerotic. The time that it takes, on average, to secure planning permission, known as development consent, for major infrastructure projects has more than doubled in the last decade to more than four years. The development consent system is nowadays beset by objections and judicial reviews, with several judicial reviews sometimes affecting the same project. The effect of the delay may be to cause an otherwise viable project to become uneconomic and unaffordable. I gave the example of the Stonehenge tunnel, which was delayed by over four years by two sets of judicial reviews relating to two separate development consent orders—DCOs. A similar delay was caused to Manston Airport, which has reopened recently. There were two sets of judicial reviews necessitating two development consent orders, and there was a delay of almost four years. In 2020, a judicial review affecting the airports national policy statement took over two and a half years before the principle of a third runway at Heathrow was endorsed. The Government’s current judicial review reforms contained in the Bill are very modest. They will make little difference, because they relate only to the prior permission stage for judicial reviews. Approximately 75% of judicial reviews are given permission by the court to be brought forth when they proceed to a substantive hearing, which, in turn, can take a considerable length of time. The Bill does not address this problem of judicial reviews and the consequent costs and delays. There is little indication that the necessary reforms to address the problem are under consideration. Meanwhile, judicial reviews continue to arrive. Last week, 10 grants for an intended judicial review of a recent decision to give development consent for Gatwick Airport’s second runway were announced, and one expects that the judicial review will be initiated soon. The present amendment provides an acceptable alternative to judicial reviews of nationally important infrastructure projects, and it has constitutional precedents. The amendment would allow for approved development consent orders for nationally significant infrastructure projects to be confirmed by a one-clause Act of Parliament. It would reactivate the system which prevailed when provisional order confirmation Bills were commonplace. After due consideration by Parliament, including a Joint Committee, the resulting Act incorporating the approved development consent order would essentially be incontestable after it had been ratified. The amendment is accompanied by an extensive schedule, Schedule 3A, which declares how this system of parliamentary confirmation of these nationally important DCOs would operate in practice. The schedule provides for a process of petitioning against the Bill, largely in relation to matters not already considered by the examination process for the DCO and subsequently by the Secretary of State. This would preserve the rights of the affected parties. However, once this process has been undergone and the DCO has been confirmed by an Act of Parliament, the possibility of wilful obstruction to the delivery of the project concerned would be minimised. Neither the Act nor the DCO could be questioned in any court or tribunal. However, if circumstances do change, such as to require a later modification of the DCO—for example, because of project design changes—the amendment allows for the DCO to be changed in accordance with the procedures set out in Schedule 6 to the Planning Act 2008, as proposed to be amended by Clause 11 of the Bill. The revised amendment carefully reflects the points that were made in Committee. The noble Lord, Lord Banner, was concerned that this procedure should not be applied to the commonality of development consent orders, but only to those relating to projects of critical national importance. At the start of the amendment, there is now an explicit link to the relevant national policy statement. The parliamentary procedure would be open only to those projects set out in the national policy statement as being of critical national priority. The revised amendment accepts that the parliamentary procedure should be resorted to only if the applicant for the DCO had asked for it to apply. There is no need for a separate Secretary of State determination of critical national priority status. The noble Lord, Lord Banner, was also concerned that the objections of those facing compulsory acquisition through the development consent order should have an explicit right to be heard by the parliamentary Joint Committee, and such a right is now accorded in the revised wording of Schedule 3A.