§ Mr. Heddleasked the Secretary of State for the Environment whether there has been any improvement in the time it takes his Department to deal with compulsory orders made under housing powers.
§ Mr. Geoffrey FinsbergWhen this Government took office, the average time for submission of a compulsory purchase order by a local authority to its decision by the Secretary of State was nearly 14 months for opposed 101W orders involving public inquiries and four months for unopposed ones. That has been reduced to 10 and three months respectively. A main factor in that improvement was that it had been possible to shorten the time taken to set up a public inquiry from 18 weeks to 12.