Lord Young of Cookham (Con)

My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for her explanation. I have no difficulty at all with the thrust of this statutory instrument, but I have one or two queries. Throughout her speech, the Minister referred to Crown development, but the Explanatory Memorandum says that this concerns “planning permission for the development of Crown land”. Does this apply only to development on land that the Government already own? Or, as the Minister said, is this about Crown development, possibly on land owned by other people or organisations? If I am right and this is confined to the development of Crown land, as the Explanatory Memorandum says on pages 1 and 3, is there a definition of “Crown land”? We are familiar with the Crown Estate but what exactly is Crown land? Secondly, can the Minister give us some examples of the sorts of development that might be relevant to this statutory instrument? I understand the process that she described, but I did not get a picture of exactly when this would be used by the Government. It would be helpful if she could flesh that out. Thirdly, this measure applies to development that is urgent and in the national interest or “securing planning permission for nationally important and urgent Crown development”. Is that justiciable? In other words, would it be possible to slow down the whole process if somebody came up and said, “This is a misuse of this statutory instrument. This is not nationally important or urgent”? In that case, the whole objective of this SI—to speed things up—could be nullified if the decision to use it was justiciable. My final point is a petty one. I notice that, on pages 2 and 3, a whole lot of legislation is being amended. It is not clear to me why the Caravan Sites Act 1968, for example, has to be amended as a result of what we are doing in this SI. Is there some particular caravan site occupying a site of enormous national importance that might have to be used for the purpose of some giant infrastructure scheme? Looking at pages 2 and 3, one sees a whole series of pieces of legislation, and it is not absolutely clear why they all need to be amended to bring this SI into effect.