Housing and Regeneration Bill

moved, as an amendment to Amendment No. 51, Amendment No. 51A: 51A: After Clause 7, line 5, after second ““the”” insert ““principal”” The noble Lord said: I shall speak also to the other amendments included in this group, in which I have three amendments. Amendments Nos. 51A and 53A seek to amend the paragraph in the noble Earl’s proposed new clause that deals with flooding. However, Amendment No. 51B appears in this group by mistake. We seem to have spent many hours looking at groupings over the past fortnight and I do not know why Amendment No. 51B has been included here. However, it is not the fault of the Government; it is mine. In fact, the issues it covers will be dealt with when we come to the amendments dealing with planning, particularly those tabled by my noble friend Lady Hamwee. Therefore, I shall not speak to Amendment No. 51B at all. The new clause being proposed by the noble Earl is interesting in that it covers a number of issues. I shall speak to the first two paragraphs briefly before I move on to the flooding business. I entirely support the aims of the first part of the amendment, which deals with local authorities. Clearly, the HCA should consult with and have regard to the views of local authorities. That is vital. If the HCA does not work with local authorities, it will be a recipe for conflict and the system will not work. It will be interesting to hear the Minister’s response and whether they think that it worthwhile putting this in the Bill. The second part of the amendment in relation to gardens and urban green spaces is a bit of a digression. It is more of a digression than was the rural amendment. In most cases, the HCA will not be particularly involved in the details of giving planning permission for what are, by their very nature, small local developments in gardens. There may be larger developments in urban green spaces where people may build, for example, football stadia. Even so, this matter is for local planning authorities. It is for them to be sufficiently robust in their local plans, and in their local development plan as a whole, to be able to deal with this matter. Those local authorities which say that they have no option but to give planning permission really should look at their own plans, although there have been cases where they have been overridden on appeal. I am not sure that this proposal belongs in this Bill, although it gives a useful opportunity to raise the question. The noble Earl referred to genuine brownfield sites. The issue here is that often, over the past 20 to 30 years, a local authority has demolished a building—a factory, a mill, an area of dereliction or whatever—and has spent money tidying the area up and making it into a pleasant site. Local people now may think that it is a greenfield site because there is grass growing on it and, consequently, that it is green belt, which obviously is not the case. Some sites are genuinely brownfield sites, in the sense that 25 years ago they were railway sidings, the site of an old mill or whatever, which have been regarded as a local amenity patch since then. When a site changes from being brownfield to a green urban space is a matter of judgment. That can pose an interesting question, but these matters should be resolved at the local level and not by the HCA. Flooding is a much wider issue than just the projects that the HCA will look at, although by their very nature HCA projects will tend to be larger scale and may be therefore of real significance. I was able to take part in a short debate a couple of weeks ago, which was sponsored by the noble Lord, Lord Rotherwick, when we were able to go into some of these issues. We have to be very careful not to use phrases like ““a presumption against all developments on flood plains””. Development on flood plains is not necessarily a bad thing, although it can be. The key words in the noble Earl’s second amendment are ““resilient and resistant””. Appropriate development can increase the resilience and resistance to flooding or can reduce damage from flooding because it can change the physical arrangements on a flood plain. What matters is whether it is possible to deal with flood risks at all levels; be it a high, medium or low risk. If there are flood risks, the development and the way in which it takes place should deal with those risks in a sensible way. If you have a choice whether to develop on a flood plain or elsewhere, the odds are that you will develop not on the flood plain, but that does not mean that all development on flood plains is automatically bad just because we are now getting more flooding. The view is gaining ground in this country, especially in some parts of the press, that developing on flood plains is automatically a bad thing. That is not the case. We must develop in a sensible way in sensible places and use that development to manage the hydrological system on the flood plain. That is the purpose of my amendment. My other amendment merely queries whether the Government really meant to include parish councils, but that is a fairly minor matter, so I shall not pursue it further. What matters is appropriate, resilient and resistant development, rather than no development at all, and setting up schemes in flood plains to hold water much more than is done now in some places to prevent flooding downstream. That is development of a sort, so development per se is not to be discouraged. What is to be discouraged is inappropriate development. I beg to move.