Housing and Regeneration Bill

My Lords, perhaps I may put a penn’orth in on the amendment. Promoting the reuse and reclamation of brownfield land is absolutely fine; I have no difficulty with that. The puzzle that I have is: when does land go from being commercially developed to being derelict and to being ““brownfield””? I can think of one site not so far from me where development started but was never completed. Is that or is it not brownfield? When the brownfield site concept started, it was quite obvious what such a site was, because there was much virtually derelict land and there were a lot of completely unused sites about the place. Some of them were arguable—hospital sites in greenbelts and that sort of thing—but development tends to be progressive. Industrial and commercial sites in particular are vulnerable and can go out of use. Are they immediately brownfield sites just because they happen to be out of use? Someone may come along and find a use for the buildings anyway and we may not need to redevelop them. At what point do we make the distinction between an unused site and a brownfield site? We need to think about that a little.