PERMISSION GRANTED ON OR AFTER COMMENCEMENT DATE (Hansard, 14 October 1975)

§ Mr. Alec Jones
I beg to move Amendment No. 173 in page 21, line 2, after 'except', insert:' '(a) where there are no outstanding material interests in the land and the development covered by the permission is carried out by or on behalf of an authority, or (b)'. This amendment provides that planning permissions for relevant development granted on or after the relevant date shall not be suspended where the development is carried out: by or on behalf of an authority … on land in which there are no material interests outstanding; that is, which is all in public ownership.
Clause 23(2) was amended in Committee, as hon. Members will recall, as part of a series of Government amendments which introduced the concept of outstanding material interests.
When the consequential amendments were made one situation was overlooked and this now needs to be covered. It is the case where planning permission is granted in respect of land at a time when there are outstanding interests not in public ownership. Such a planning permission then becomes suspended.

§ Mr. A. P. Costain (Folkestone and Hythe)
The hon. Gentleman refers to material interests. Will he explain the position if a covenant on the land is still applied? Would it be considered a material interest under this amendment?

§ Mr. Jones
The point raised by the hon. Gentleman is not relevant to this amendment. However, I understand that the answer is that it would not be covered.
This matter is a little complicated but not quite as serious as it sounds. Such a planning permission would then be suspended. I take the position of an authority which then acquires those interests. As the Bill is at present drafted, such an authority has no means of implementing a suspended planning permission in order to carry out a development. The permission can be activated by virtue of Clause 23 if the authority disposes of the land to someone else, or it can go through the procedure and grant itself another planning permission for the same development. This is a cumbersome way of overcoming the difficulty. The amendment cures this defect or oversight by inserting a provision in Clause 23 that a planning permission shall not be suspended where the development to which it relates is carried out on land in respect of which there are no material interests outstanding by or on behalf of any authority.

§ Mr. Costain
Although the Minister brushed my question aside by saying that it does not apply to these amendments, I must press him further on the matter. There are many cases where land has covenants on it which are owned by other outside interests. It is not necessarily the case that because the council or local authority has applied a compulsory purchase order the covenant is automatically extinguished.
This clause applies to land where there is no other outstanding material interest. Will the Minister take advice from his experts on this and reconsider the answer he gave me, because the point is germane?

§ Mr. Jones
I take the hon. Gentleman's point. If I have made a mistake I am sure that we shall take steps to correct it in another place. I was merely referring to a situation in which the authority has acquired all the material interests. It is 1163 not a question of there being any further outstanding material interests. The Bill applies only when the authority has acquired all those material interests. I am in the fortunate position of being able to assure the hon. Gentleman that covenants on land are not, as such, material interests.

§ Mr. Rossi
The answer to the question is simply that material interests are given a specific meaning in Clause 6. "Material interest" means either the freehold or a leasehold interest with seven years or more still to run. Therefore, it is a term of art and would not cover covenants.
One of the schedules which we considered yesterday deals specifically with the extinction of covenants on land once acquired by a local authority. That is one of the matters which we tried to deal with by amendment but, unfortunately, we were unable to persuade the Government to agree with us on that yesterday. We considered in one of the schedules the fact that the acquisition of land by local authorities automatically extinguished private rights, interests and covenants—for example, rights of way, easements and matters of that kind. The point my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Costain) made was dealt with yesterday. We tried to persuade the right hon. Gentleman to look at the matter in another fashion but once again we could not soften his heart.

§ Mr. John Silkin
I beg to move Amendment No. 342, in page 21, line 10, leave out from 'issued' to end of line 11 and insert 'a certificate in the prescribed form'.

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker
With this it is convenient to take Amendment No. 343 in page 21, line 13, leave out from 'apply' to end of line 15.

§ Mr. Silkin
These amendments are designed to simplify the Bill, and to that extent should be welcomed by—

§ Mr. Graham Page (Crosby)
That is impossible.

§ Mr. Silkin
I thought that some of the Opposition amendments were also designed to simplify the Bill. I am glad to see the right hon. Gentleman. We have missed him.

§ Mr. Page
I can assure the right hon. Gentleman and the House that was serving on another Committee of the House.

§ Mr. Silkin
I was aware of that and I was about to say that it is good to have the right hon. Gentleman back.
The trouble with a simplification is that it starts from the premise that the original parts were somewhat complicated. Without detaining the House too long I shall try to explain the complications.
Clause 23(3) sets out the circumstances in which a planning permission granted after the relevant date becomes suspended and, therefore, capable of being implemented. There are four basic situations in which this could occur. Clause 23(3)(c) states that the authority has issued to the person to whom it has disposed of the land a certificate stating that it is satisfied that (a) and (b) apply.
However, by virtue of Schedule 9, paragraph 6(2), the certificate mentioned in (c) must be registered in the planning register and will thus be common knowledge, or at any rate public knowledge. It is not, therefore, necessary for it to be specifically issued to the owner at the time of the disposal.
Moreover, because the certificate, and its underlying implications, would apply to any person who is, for the time being, the owner of the land there is no need to specify that the development must be carried out by that owner or any successor in title of him. Subsection (3)(d)— the development is carried out by that person or any successor in title of his".— can therefore be omitted. The new requirement in subsection (3)(c), that the certificate must be in the prescribed form, merely brings the document into line with other forms of notice which are also to be prescribed. This is a highly technical but, I hope, simplifying amendment.

§ Mr. Rossi
I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I press him a little on the meaning of the amendment. As he rightly says, we are dealing with a very technical and complicated part of the Bill, with the circumstances in which planning permissions go into suspended animation whilst the local authority considers whether it will take over the land.
We have been bedevilled by the circumstances surrounding the wording of the Bill. The form of wording used in 1165 Clause 23 in the Bill as drafted was substantially and radically amended in Committee. Now we are having further substantial amendments to it on Report. The numbering of these two amendments indicates that they were part of that group of amendments brought before us at the eleventh hour. I say all that as a way of apology to the right hon. Gentleman for having to weary him, perhaps, with a further explanation of the amendment.
As we left the matter in Committee, this provision meant that the local authority would issue its certificate to the owner of the land or to a successor of title to the owner of the land. The impression left was that this was bound up in some way with the prior rights procedure, something which we were jealous to guard. At one stage, particularly when this was read in conjunction with the provisions of Schedule 3, it would have been possible for any person to apply for planning permission of someone else's land, and whilst that permission was in suspension the local authority and that third party could come to an arrangement between them for the development of the owner's land on terms satisfactory to the local authority and the third party, leaving the owner with current use value as the barest form of compensation for the expropriation or confiscation of his land, which are the terms in which we see this exercise.
We succeeded in amending Schedule 3, and as a result the third party would have to obtain the owner's consent before the local authority could entertain an application for the right of the third party to have the land sold to him or to carry out the development over the head of the owner. Of course, this was an important concession and established the owner of the land as having prior rights over people whom we were pleased to call at one stage "bounty hunters".
We thought that part and parcel of that concept was subsection (3) of Clause 23, dealing with the suspension of planning permissions which could be unsuspended in certain circumstances. The circumstances of the Bill as left by us in Committee meant that an unsuspension of the planning permission—I apologise for the language one is having to use—could take place on the issue of a certificate to the owner of the land or his 1166 successor in title, someone to whom he has sold the land.
It seems to me, however, that now this clause is being widened so that the certificate can be used for the benefit of anybody, and, therefore, we feel a little nervous. I am seeking an assurance that these fears are unfounded. They arise perhaps because of the short time we have been given to study and understand very technical amendments to very technical clauses.

§ Mr. John Silkin
The hon. Member for Hornsey (Mr. Rossi) and the right hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Page) must know, because they have both served in my Department, that even though we are often ourselves skilled in technicalities it sometimes takes us a little while to unravel them. I wanted to make my explanation as simple as possible, and perhaps in simplifying the simplification I oversimplified.
We are talking about not the prior rights procedure but the fact that the certificate is granted at a much later time, after the prior rights applications have been considered. Subsection (3)(a) says … the land has been disposed of by … the local authority. In that case, the prior rights situation will not apply. I hope that with that assurance, coupled with the fact that the amendment is intended to simplify and not to alter, the hon. Gentleman will be satisfied.

§ Mr. Graham Page
The Minister has not satisfied me, although he may have satisfied my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey (Mr. Rossi). I want to know what happens to the certificate when it is issued. Under the Bill as drafted, at least the authority issued the certificate to someone. In an earlier debate, the Under-Secretary of State asked whether I thought we papered the parlour with the certificate. Nevertheless, the certificate does not seem to be given or issued to anyone. It seems to be left in the air. As the Bill originally stood, the certificate at least landed in someone's lap.
I suppose that that is a suspended certificate in the circumstances and not an unsuspended certificate. We really ought to find some other term for "unsuspended". Surely we could have something like "dropped planning permission", for example. The term reminds me of the 1167 song "A Very Happy Un-birthday to You". We have talked about "unsuspended" so much that it has almost got into the Bill. The right hon. Gentleman has already removed from the Bill some of these "undesignated relevant developments" or something or other that we talked about in Committee. Cannot we also get rid of "unsuspension" as well?

§ Mr. John Silkin
I am afraid that the right hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Page) is on to an "un-point". The certificate does not go into the air—it goes into the Planning Register, which is a useful and admirable institution open to anyone who wishes to use it.

§ Mr. Graham Page
The right hon. Gentleman was not in the Standing Committee on the Land Charges Bill this morning. There, we criticised the Planning Register to such an extent that I suggested that it would be better to abolish it.

§ Mr. Fairbairn
Can the right hon. Gentleman enlighten me about the Planning Register? We have had the registration of all land in Scotland since time immemorial. The tenure of property has been the basis of our law. How is the concept of the Land Register—which it is alleged the public regularly consult as if they were looking up a train timetable—correlated in Scotland with the registration of land?

§ Mr. John Silkin
When I became a Member of the House I made several resolutions, some of which have not followed me through. One was that I would never speak for longer than 13 minutes. Others I have kept. The second resolution I made was never to talk about things I knew nothing about, under which heading comes the whole of Scots law. The hon. and learned Gentleman was busy at the Chair when I wanted to refer to him and say that I hoped that the simplification would appeal to him.