DEFINITIONS (Hansard, 11 November 1975)

§ The Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. Gordon Oakes)
I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.

§ Mr. Speaker
With this amendment we are to discuss Lords Amendments Nos. 4, 6, 14, 15, 17 to 30, 32, 85 and 175.

§ Mr. Oakes
This whole batch of amendments deals with definitions which are now contained between Clauses 3 and 6. The definitions have been moved from various clauses in the Bill to these 1147 clauses and they are now bracketed together as an interpretation clause. That is purely the purpose of the amendments, and they are in accord with what the Opposition argued in Committee should be done.

§ Mr. Graham Page (Crosby)
I am grateful to the Minister for rearranging the Bill in this way. I said in Committee that it would be far easier for those who are called upon to operate the Bill if all the definitions were put together and a few more were added—although I do not know why we should try to make this horrible Bill easier. Perhaps it would have been better if we had made it more difficult to understand, and impossible to operate. I am glad to say that the definitions follow the Town and Country Planning Act 1971, which we talked about very much in Committee.
There are two points to which I should draw attention. First, Amendment No. 17 is rather more material than just a drafting amendment. It removes the definition of "development land", and that is a major point in the Bill.
Secondly, the removal of subsections (3), (4), (5) and (6) of Clause 4, those relating to material interest, will be a little puzzling to those who are looking at the amendments to the Bill at this stage. So that we may have it on the record, will the hon. Gentleman say why the subsections concerning material interest are being removed?

§ Mr. Michael Latham (Melton)
The House is in some difficulty in dealing with a Bill which is still as it was before the Second Reading in the Lords. I do not blame the right hon. Gentleman the Minister. It is nothing to do with him, but we have no Lords amendments in the Bill before us, which makes it very difficult for hon. Members to follow exactly what is going on. It is difficult even for those of us—of whom there are many in the Chamber now—who have been closely following the Bill throughout its passage through Parliament.

§ Mr. Oakes
I thank the right hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Page) for what he said at the beginning of his intervention. It is true that the right hon. Gentleman advocated in Committee the change that we have made. My right 1148 hon. Friend and I saw the sense in what he proposed, particularly as all three of us are practitioners. We hoped to make the change on Report, but it has been done properly and adequately in another place.
Lords Amendment No. 17 deletes the definition of "development land" only because that definition is now contained in Clause 3.
Lords Amendment No. 26 merely deletes things that are now dealt with in the new Clause 3A, which is to be inserted by Lords Amendment No. 13.

§ Mr. Hugh Rossi (Hornsey)
I am trying hard at this short notice to find my way through the variety of definitions and groupings before us. I do not have the number of the amendment in question, but I see that there is to be a new Clause 52D, which states: Any direction or consent given by the Secretary of State under this Act may be— (a)either general or limited to any particular case or class of case, (b)addressed to any particular authority or class of authority, or (c)unconditional or subject to condtions. That appears to me to be a substitute for Clause 6(2). The whole of Clause 6 is deleted by one of the amendments in the large group that we are considering. Subsection (3) seems to disappear altogether, because it is not reintroduced in the new clause to be inserted after Clause 52. It may well be that the Minister can tell me that it has gone somewhere else. We have seen, for example, that Clause 6(1) has now gone into the new definition clause. Can the hon. Gentleman tell us where Clause 6(3) has gone?

§ Mr. Oakes
I certainly can. The provisions of new Clause 52D were previously contained in Clause 6(2), which now disappears. Clause 6(3) reappears in Clause 4 by the operation of Lords Amendment No. 18.

§ Mr. Rossi
I am much obliged.

§ Mr. Oakes
I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.

§ Mr. Speaker
With this amendment it is convenient to take Lords Amendments No. 84, 121, 122, 146 and 147.

§ Mr. Oakes
The amendments are to correct a minor drafting error. The main purpose of subsection (8) is to make it clear that any reference in the Bill to an "authority" is a reference to that authority operating within its own area. But the subsection goes on to provide that a reference to a given class of authority—for example, a reference to "local authority"—is also to be interpreted as referring to the authority of that class within whose area the land is situated. This was needed for some provisions in the Bill, but in other places it has the wrong result.
For example, Clause 39 gives the Secretary of State power to make grants to local authorities—a class of authority—when they buy land from the Crown. We want this to apply whether the Crown land which is being bought is inside or outside the area of the particular local authority, but the second half of subsection (8), which it is proposed to delete, would have restricted the power to give grants only to cases where the land was in the area of the local authority. Similar considerations occur with Clause 26, dealing with the compensation payable when one local authority buys from another.