Draft National Policy Statement for Waste Water

Debate between Baroness Morris of Bolton and Lord Dixon-Smith

Tuesday 5th April 2011 Grand Committee

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Morris of Bolton)]

My Lords, there is a speakers list, so it is possible to speak in the gap. We are in the gap now.

[Lord Dixon-Smith]

My Lords, that is an amusing correction: to find myself up in the right place and being corrected for it. I would like to follow on a little from what my noble friend Lord Teverson has said to my noble friend the Minister.

The question here is the definition of an infrastructure project. I wonder whether, in his response, the Minister could give us some inkling as to why the national infrastructure policy is defined as covering projects affecting a population of more than 500,000. Why is it not some other figure? I ask this question with deliberate intent, because we will be putting major projects through a somewhat simplified but none the less well-defined planning process that will work much more rapidly. Whatever its future legal status may be as a result of coming legislation, we think that this process will work more rapidly than the normal planning system.

I suspect that I could make a good case for suggesting that the threshold of 500,000 people affected should be reduced to 250,000 people. This would bring a much greater number of schemes within the scope of this policy statement. It would, therefore, make accessible to the provision of those schemes an accelerated planning process, which would facilitate improvements to water quality across a wider field.

That figure, to me, is the critical figure in this report; all the rest of it, you might say, is procedure. However, we are dealing with how you define a national policy statement. I accept that there is always a difficulty with that sort of definition and the judging of nationally significant projects, particularly in the field of electric lines and so on, given that they affect a large number of people. However, I am not sure that you could always say that a particular electric line, which would come within the scope of the national policy statement for power generation and transmission, would always affect more than 500,000 people. I strongly suspect that many of those schemes would impact on a much smaller number of people, but, none the less, they are part of the national policy statement structure.

I would be grateful if the Minister would take away with him the thought that that figure should be considered a bit more. I sincerely ask him to consider whether it would be practical to put in a lower figure to facilitate the accelerated planning process that would then come forward to help major schemes. A scheme that affects 250,000 people is still a major scheme.