Housing and Regeneration Bill

I have a brief amendment in this group. I cannot imagine that this group will take us more than an hour, like the previous one did, but who knows? My Amendment No. 36 would replace, "““roads or other transport facilities””," with ““transport facilities””. At all stages we ought to establish a level playing field between different types of transport and not assume that roads are necessarily at the top of the hierarchy in all cases. Of course, roads have a very detailed and intricate local relationship with any development, because they go right up to front doors or factory doors and, through the network, they link into main roads, trunk roads and motorways. New developments such as railways would not have that direct relationship, but if we are thinking of the Homes and Communities Agency being involved in eco-towns—I do not know whether we are; perhaps we can tease that out later on planning issues—and talking about ecologically, economically and socially sustainable new settlements, we certainly ought to be thinking about whether railway connections, for example, are possible, even if it involves building new lines. Nevertheless, there are other forms of transport that have the same detailed and intricate local relationship with housing and other buildings as roads do, such as cycleways and footpaths. I could understand a reference in the Bill to highways, but it says roads. I think perhaps that was put in automatically by whoever drafted the legislation, because there is an assumption nowadays that roads come first and everything else comes second. That is the purpose of the amendment.