Housing and Regeneration Bill

I understand that perfectly fair point. It is equally fair to say that if a local authority is to get an eco-town or another new development of that scale, it is not a one-off that comes and goes, it will be there for a considerable number of years and the answer is to staff that local authority properly with the skilled people required in those circumstances. There is no dispute about that. Some of the rest of what the noble Baroness said related simply to the conflict between local democracy and involvement and how far national objectives should be imposed on local communities. That debate will go on and on, but there is something of a clash if the answer is imposition of national decisions, when we have a Government who constantly tell us how they are in favour of devolution of policy-making and everything else to local government and strengthening local government and local democracy. The Government have to decide which side of this argument they are on. It is clearly not an absolute matter and it never can be, but many of us would say that the balance has shifted to the centre so much in the past 35 years that if the Government are serious about shifting power back to the local level, they cannot keep saying ““Yes, but it does not apply here and there””. We will continue to have that argument on Bill after Bill and in debate after debate. Finally, this feels a bit like old-fashioned legislation. When the original generation of new towns was planned in the 1940s and the 1950s, the planning system by modern standards was rudimentary. There was very little planning structure in place and development control tended to be a fairly simple, hit-and-miss affair. Slowly, over the years, development control has become much more complex. For example, in the 1950s many planning decisions were made with no conditions at all. They were simply passed. Now even decisions on quite straightforward applications for kitchen extensions and so on will have a page of conditions attached, while decisions on complicated applications will have page after page of conditions. Linked to that is the development of plans. Town maps developed in the 1960s and plans for the use of land within towns became common, but outside towns there was little other than the national parks, the AONBs and the green belt around London. That should be compared with the detailed plans we have now and the complex planning policy statements. We have PPGs issued at national level; regional spatial strategies are being put together and agreed; we have county structure plans which refer to parts which have been saved and included in the RSSs and so on; we have local plans which are of themselves detailed and complex; and we have the process of local development frameworks, which perhaps is using up all the planners who the noble Baroness, Lady Ford, talked about, who are not available for development control. It is a complex and intricate system. The question that has to be asked is: how does an old-fashioned, top-down approach to taking over an area and developing it fit in to the modern system? If the modern system cannot cope with these sorts of developments, is there not something fundamentally wrong with it? I return to what I said on another amendment: some of this seems like old-fashioned legislation.