Housing and Regeneration Bill

I thoroughly support the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Cathcart, and I should like to add one footnote. The year 2000 may be the first instance of the term ““brownfield”” being used in legislation or guidance, but it has an older pedigree in strategic and tactical debate. I recall that many years before 2000 a firm was established in my constituency which published a regular newsletter called the Catalyst and offered site-soil analysis services as a preface to planning and site use. Brownfield was very much part of the jargon even then. I support absolutely what my noble friend and others have said about gardens. There is an element of coincidence in that the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, who unusually is not in his place, was in another era the Member of Parliament for Stratford-upon-Avon. Although my noble friend Lord Cathcart alluded to gardens in a rural capacity, however one places Stratford-upon-Avon in that regard, my understanding is that the gardens issue is wholly live there. In what is an iconic town, the deleterious effect of the development of gardens is very noticeable. However, that is a coincidence. On flooding, my former neighbour, the retired disabled agricultural labourer to whom I alluded earlier and who was the oldest person in our hamlet who had been born there, said of a private housing development two villages away that, ““They’ll rue the day. There’s always been flooding there””, and of course they have. The opportunity cost of maintaining ancient rural knowledge and country lore through the disappearance of farm labourers is worth a parody or even a threnody of Thomas Hardy or AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. At the other end of the spectrum from my retired disabled agricultural labourer neighbour, I recall the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who is normally the soul of geniality and good sense, having one of his rare sense-of-humour failures when on one occasion yet another noble Lord raised the flood risks in the Thames Gateway, where so much housing development has been contemplated and where there does seem to be an element of perversity on which I am sure the Minister will be able to set our minds at rest. The professional advice on the flood risk, however, seems to be pretty comprehensive. I see a virtue in the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, on the subject of floodplains. Amendment No. 77 is a happy antidote to the gardens problem already described. Moreover, in an era of climate change, it is a potential stimulus to the employment expansion of the expertise to which I referred in the initiative in my former constituency. Finally, I turn to the caveats that the Minister, Caroline Flint, expressed, to which my noble friend alluded. I think that I am at this moment the only person in the Committee who has served in the other place. The noble Lords, Lord Graham and Lord Howarth, have and they have contributed to other parts of the debate. But there is no moment that a constituency Member of Parliament dreads more than when you are having a meeting on a contentious issue and a person at the back, who almost certainly you recognise, raises the one question that you do not want raised. At a meeting which was reasonably placid until that moment, you can watch the infection run contagiously the whole way around the room. Therefore, if the Minister, Miss Flint, has given the assurances she has, all I that I can say is that I hope that she is not too often on the platform when the disagreeable question is asked.