Housing and Regeneration Bill

moved Amendment No. 62: 62: Schedule 3, page 158, line 22, leave out paragraphs 3 to 18 The noble Baroness said: This short probing amendment seeks to examine whether the Minister thinks that the Government have got it right. As I read the Bill, they can do what they like with rights of way. When the government agency decides that a right of way should be extinguished, diverted or whatever, it would have a special privilege of dealing with that as it wants, rather than following the more public and democratic path that everybody else has to follow. Obviously developments sometimes require that rights of way are diverted or even extinguished, but that very often is a cheap and easy way in which to deal with the situation, and not always the most constructive—certainly not for the people who live on the far side of a development and want to access places through the development when the inclusion, although more difficult in design terms, could have been achieved. Rights of way very often suffer. On looking back, cities and towns were designed with small rights of way included as a means of access. Now that we are beginning to appreciate that the car will not, and should not, rule access issues, footpaths will again come into their own. The amendment seeks to probe the Government on why the Secretary of State should have this special power, rather than going through the normal process, as everyone else does, which has been devised over years and is inclusive. Does the Minister feel that footpaths have sufficient recognition in what should be a low-carbon approach to ways of connecting people with places that they need to access? I beg to move.