Meeting of the Parliament 22 March 2016
Section 42A is very odd. From reading it, I take it that there are two policy intentions: to protect residential properties that exist from having a crematorium built at the bottom of the garden, so to speak; and to protect the peace and tranquillity of crematoria, which the minister referred to, from the encroachment of nearby residential properties.
The immediate difficulty is that, if those are the policy objectives, section 42A is incomplete in that it does not in any sense prevent the redesignation of something that might be within 200m as a residential property. Therefore, by the way that it has been constructed, the section fails to meet one of the policy objectives.
The second issue that one might consider in relation to protecting the peace and tranquillity of the crematorium and the grounds, which often contain memorials to those who have been cremated, is that section 42A does not address a wide range of other things that might fall within 200m. Let us think about some things that might do that. A school, a play park, a cinema, a theatre, a public house or a restaurant might do so. If we want to protect a crematorium’s peace and tranquillity, we would need to consider that issue and not simply ban residential properties.
Section 42A is not constructed in a way that would delivery adequately on either of the policy objectives. However, the minister—I speak as a former planning minister—makes an excellent point when she says that putting it into primary legislation is an odd way to deal with a planning issue. The national planning guidelines would be a much more appropriate place, because that would leave councils—who are the planning authorities—the discretion to make decisions that are appropriate to the circumstances before them. In particular, circumstances in a rural location may be very different from those that prevail in an urban location.
Perhaps with regret regarding the policy intentions of the person whose amendment inserted section 42A, we must remove the section at this stage and deal with the issue in a more appropriate way, via the planning system.