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Mr. Michael Brown
To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment what is the average length of time taken to deal with planning appeals relating to (a) minerals extraction other than opencast coal mining and (b) opencast coal.
Mr. Atkins
The latest information available is for the financial year 1989–90 and is as follows:
| Case type | Number of cases decided | Median time from start to decision (weeks) |
| (a) Minerals appeals other than open cast coal | 49 | 37 |
| (b) Open-cast coal appeals | 9 | 40 |