Member

I see some benefits if the purpose here is solely streamlining. If you take a heritage organisation such as a heritage railway, it could reduce the bureaucracy that it sees when it wants to make changes to the site that it protects and for which it is the custodians. But many heritage organisations have raised very serious concerns about the potential consequences of the clause as drafted and share the concerns that my noble friend has set out about the motivations behind it, or certainly the consequences of it. It provides discretionary powers for the Secretary of State to disapply legislative protections relating to heritage, and we have not yet had the sort of clarity that we need about how and when this discretion would be applied.