Lord Moylan (Con)

My Lords, I shall be brief, after this very valuable debate. I make it clear that the Opposition Front Bench is fully behind the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and my noble friend Lord Lansley. I seek to add nothing to the detail of their amendments, which were so eloquently argued by both of them. I just add one reflection of my own. It is very easy to imagine that listed building consents and planning applications are much the same thing, because they are usually dealt with by the same officers in the same local authority. But they are not; they are two very distinct legal regimes, which have two very distinct bases. Planning is essentially about mitigating and shaping the externalities of development so as to minimise public harm and perhaps achieve some public good—it is to do with utility—whereas listed building legislation is about a test of absolute value. Either a building is listed and therefore is to be preserved, implicitly for ever, or it is not. Of course, there are grades of listing and it is possible to delist a building, so there is a little movement around the edges. However, in essence, it is a test not of utility—of whether something is useful to us—but of value. For the Government to mix up these two, to mash them together, is to ignore that very important distinction. The listed building regime is not part of a trade-off as a consequence of that. You do not say that, because we can achieve something useful on the one hand—a faster railway, shorter route or whatever it might be—there is a calculus by which we can demolish so many listed buildings to achieve that. They are not commensurate regimes. The Government would do very well to withdraw this clause altogether and rely on the flexibility in existing arrangements. I look forward to hearing what the noble Lord has to say, but I suspect that we will be debating this again in due course.