Clause 29.—(EXPEDITION OF HIGHWAY PROCEDURE IN CONNECTION WITH ELECTRICITY WORKS.) (Hansard, 4 April 1957)

§ Mr. Maudling
I beg to move, in page 24, line 35, to leave out "paragraph 1 of".
It would be convenient, I suggest, to discuss at the same time the following three Amendments, which are all drafting Amendments.

§ Mr. Deputy-Speaker
Yes.

§ Mr. Maudling
Briefly, the purpose of the Amendments is as follows. The Committee agreed to an Amendment which we proposed, and which is now in the form of Clause 29, dealing with the stopping up of highways. Its effect was that where planning permission had been granted for, say, a generating station, it might be necessary subsequently for the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation to make an order stopping up a highway to enable work to proceed.
It was agreed in the Committee upstairs that as the whole machinery of obtaining planning permission would already have been gone through, it was unreasonable to provide, as the 1947 Act at present provides, for three months' notice in a local newspaper, and so on, to give people a chance to make objections. It was agreed that the period of three months' notice might in all the circumstances be reduced to thirty days. The period of three months' notice for publication in the local newspaper is 633 contained in paragraph 1 of the Sixth Schedule to the Town and Country Planning Act, 1947.
Clause 29. in its present form, amends that paragraph but it does not amend paragraph 4 of that Schedule, which also contains an incidental reference to the period of three months. Obviously, if we are to reduce the period from three months to thirty days in paragraph 1, we must do the sane in paragraph 4, because the one governs the other. In that sense, therefore, this group of Amendments is consequential upon what has already been decided.