Contribution
With Amendment 17 I will also debate Amendments 18 to 23 in my name. These have been described as a “redirection”; I am not exactly sure what that means, but there is a theme that I hope will become clear. I thank my noble friends on the Front Bench for adding their names to Amendments 17 and 23.
As the Explanatory Notes and various bits of memoranda make clear, this clause is designed to try to speed up aspects of planning, and I understand that flexibility may be wanted. I was a bit surprised when Minister Pennycook in the other place suggested in Committee, talking about offshore generation, that perhaps the MMO could become the planning authority in that regard. The MMO is simply not big enough to get into that.
The theme through my amendments is the fact that a Secretary of State has some literally very special powers, called special development orders. That is why I have tabled some quite detailed amendments. While the narrative, including in Committee and in various memoranda, has been that it can go to an alternative consenting authority, the reason I have tabled these amendments is that there is an alternative consenting authority: the Secretary of State himself or herself.
Amendment 17 tries to probe why the Bill refers to Section 59. You do not need to go through the NSIP and DCO process because the Secretary of State could, more or less, just authorise this tomorrow, without any public consultation, engagement and all sorts of things. The Secretary of State already has the power to do that. I expect that it is usually used for things such as MoD land, so the reasons may be somewhat related to national security infrastructure and so on, but I am concerned that this hands a heck of a lot of power to the Secretary of State, and we should at least be considering that carefully.
That is particularly true when thinking about nuclear and other energy generation, which my Amendment 23 covers. The amount of land taken by most energy projects is pretty significant, not just land for the station itself or the transmission network but the preparation land. That is why I would like to see a commitment, ideally in law, that this will never apply to where a Secretary of State themselves can, on request, give planning permission to something from a developer.
I turn to another aspect of my amendments. This is a novel process—I think that is the explanation in various memoranda—and it will be done by regulations. Putting in the Bill three months for the Secretary of State to make a particular decision seems reasonable if the whole point of this is that it be done quicker. By the way, that is just considering whether something should go through the DCO process or an alternative consenting authority.
In the debate on the first group, I clumsily mentioned the Minister’s commitment to write. It was actually Minister Pennycook, in the House of Commons Committee where this was considered, who pledged several times in the debate on this clause to write to the Committee. That letter may have been sent to the members of the Committee, but it certainly has never appeared on the Bill website or been deposited in the Libraries of either House. He pledged to give more examples of how this would work in practice. The reason for me probing this today is that we could end up with some kind of Stalinist Secretary of State who is determined to build whatever they like anywhere and everywhere. As it stands, through this amendment and this new clause, we will give them the powers to do that, and I do not think we should. That is why I wanted to look at this clause.
I turn to Article 6 of the convention on human rights. Again, a back-up memorandum says:
“These alternative consenting regimes are likely to be … the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, Highways Act 1980, Transport and Works Act 1992 and the Harbours Act 1964”.
But it does not say that it will be only that, which, again, is part of my concern.
So, in a variety of ways, this is probing to see whether we can properly get, in effect, a commitment from the Government on the Floor of this House or through a letter from the Minister—if it is not in legislation—that can candidly be used in a future court case when somebody might want to oppose the Secretary of State doing something so draconian. It would show that it was made clear to this House and this Parliament that that would never happen. So far, none of the back-up memoranda or Explanatory Notes makes that explicit, and that is what I hope to achieve today.
I am particularly concerned about energy projects. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is no longer in his place, but I explained on the previous group that I have extensive experience of trying to handle NSIPs as a Member of Parliament and now as a Peer in this place, and I am still very concerned about my local community and what is happening in that regard. With that, I beg to move.