Lord Moylan (Con)

My purpose here is not to enter a radical objection to Clause 38 but, rather, to raise a debate and to hear what the Minister has to say on the points that I would like to make. This clause allows the Secretary of State to set a deadline for inquiries to be conducted and concluded. As I understand the clause, the deadline is flexible in that the Secretary of State can subsequently amend it and extend it to make it longer. With the purpose of trying to speed up consents, that may appear, on the face of it, to be a very sensible measure. However, I want to draw a lesson from history here. Let us go back to the Planning Act 2008, which introduced the development consent order. One of the features of the development consent order was that the inquiry phase was to be limited; it was to be six months by statute, unless it was extended. Exactly the same approach was used all the way back in 2008 in relation to DCOs. Has that resulted in DCOs being shorter processes? It has not. It has, in effect, required all the work preparatory to the inquiry to be front-loaded, carried out and presented to the inspectors before they will agree to open the inquiry; the clock does not start running until they open it, so the six-month limit does not apply. In effect, this approach has failed in relation to DCOs. It could be argued that it has made DCOs a slower method of acquiring permission than a Transport and Works Act order currently is. To get to the point at which the inspectors are willing to start the inquiry, one has to produce every conceivable document that they might require, which sometimes results in hundreds of thousands of pages having to be produced. Under the older system—using Planning Act powers under which documents could be pulled in later on—although the overall process lasted quite a long time, it did not require as much paper as is currently required by the DCO process. I offer that lesson from history—not even history, because we live with DCOs today—as a cautionary tale. I wonder to what extent the Minister has taken account of that. Are the Government not in fact doing something here that is seductively attractive and will achieve something that we would like to see but will, in practice, slow up the whole process? I beg to move.