Lord Lansley (Con)

My Lords, with this group we have arrived at Clause 52 and introduced the important issue of spatial development strategies. Wearing my Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill badge, I recall the debates on joint spatial development strategies—others will also recall them; indeed, my noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook remembers them very well—which of course formed part of the Act. They allowed local planning authorities to seek to engage in joint spatial strategic planning. I therefore come to the point that my noble friend Lord Jamieson was just making. The principal distinction here, I suppose, is that instead of that option for local planning authorities, the Government have instead determined that there must be a national structure of strategic planning. I speak again with my levelling-up Bill hat on, and the Minister and others will recall that I very much supported—and have for a long time—strategic planning. It is difficult to envisage how genuine strategic planning is to be accomplished if it is to end up as a patchwork quilt. For the purposes of this debate, especially given the hour, I will not engage in whether there should be mandatory strategic planning across the whole country—let us assume that there should be and then see how well it can be put into place. Some of the drafting of the spatial development strategies in Clause 52 draws directly on Section 97 and Schedule 7 of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act, so I assume that that will not be brought into force. If I am wrong about that, it would be very helpful to know otherwise, but I think that I am right. As I understand it—again, it would be helpful if the Minister will say whether I am wrong about this—the Government’s intention is to achieve a national structure of strategic planning by 2030 and, in order to achieve that, they wish to commence the process of strategic planning next year. The significance of that is of course that, at the same time in the other place, the legislation to create strategic authorities will follow this Bill. Logic might have said that, at the same time as one creates strategic authorities that will have responsibility to produce strategic plans—the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill says that—it would be incorporated into the same legislation. A theme we might return to a number of times before we conclude consideration of this Bill is the extent to which it might be better, in some cases, to leave it to that legislation or others to bring it forward. My point, however, is that the Government need to make progress and are not prepared to wait. The passage of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act sometime next year will not be sufficient to create strategic authorities. We will have to go through a process to create the agreements for the necessary authorities to come together to determine what the scope and scale of strategic authorities will look like. To that extent, it is necessary to envisage that we create strategic planning. We can then retrofit it into—or, perhaps more accurately, prospectively fit it into—the structure of strategic authorities as they emerge.